Techniques for administering comingled content items

摘要

Techniques for assisting owners to remotely administer their digital content items stored at non-owners' personal computing devices. The techniques involve identifying owned content items from among content items stored in a synchronization replica that is synchronized with synchronization replicas at the non-owners' personal computing devices. The techniques further involve allowing owners to remotely perform certain administrative actions on owned content items. For example, in response to a command initiated at an owner's personal computing device, a network signal or signals can be sent to a synchronization agent installed on the non-owners' personal computing devices to automatically remove all owned content items from the synchronization replicas at the non-owners' personal computing devices. For example, the generation and sending of such signal can be performed by an online content item storage and synchronization service that synchronizes a server-stored synchronization replica with the synchronization replicas at the non-owners' personal computing devices.

主权项

1. A method comprising:
at a first time: applying ownership identification criteria to a plurality of content items that are stored in a first synchronization replica to automatically identify any of the plurality of content items that satisfy the ownership identification criteria; based on automatically identifying one or more content items, of the plurality of content items, satisfying the ownership identification criteria, automatically designating the one or more identified content items as owned by the first user; wherein automatically designating the one or more identified content items as owned by the first user comprises associating the one or more identified content items with ownership metadata indicating that the one or more identified content items are owned by the first user; wherein prior to automatically designating, the one or more identified content items were not associated with the ownership metadata; wherein a copy of the one or more content items, designated as owned by the first user, is stored in a second synchronization replica, that is not the first synchronization replica, at a personal computing device of a second user that is not the first user; wherein, as a result of a synchronization process, the ownership metadata is replicated from the first synchronization replica to the second synchronization replica; at a second time that is after the first time: applying the ownership identification criteria to a new content item added to the first synchronization replica to determine if the new content item satisfies the ownership identification criteria; based on determining that the new content item satisfies the ownership identification criteria, automatically designating the new content item as owned by the first user; wherein automatically designating the new content item as owned by the first user comprises associating the new content item with other ownership metadata indicating that the new content item is owned by the first user; wherein, as a result of a synchronization process, the new content item and the other ownership metadata is replicated from the first synchronization replica to the second synchronization replica; at a third time that is after the second time: in response to a command, initiated by the first user, to delete, from the second synchronization replica, any content items designated as owned by the first user, automatically sending an instruction, over a data network, to the personal computing device of the second user to delete, from the second synchronization replica, any content items designated as owned by the first user; wherein, the personal computing device of the second user, in response to receiving the instruction, automatically deletes the copy of the one or more content items and a copy of the new content item from the second synchronization replica; and wherein the method is performed by one or more computing devices.