They’re astonishingly poor at data ownership. When they started Dropbox Paper, a note taking web app, they sent the inline images to a different web domain. The image, doing so, became publicly visible to anyone knowing the URL! They did this without explaining anything to the user.
They also did not clarify who owns the copyright of these images sent to an apparent third party company.
Seriously, Dropbox’s user privacy and copyright management is incompetent and untrustworthy.
I’ll throw out my usual plug for Cryptomator, lets me use Dropbox’s free offering and they can’t datamine a thing because it’s encrypted before they get their grubby mitts on it
FYI the desktop version is completely free to use and relies on the desktop sync apps of the various cloud storage providers, the android version does cost about £8 but I believe it hooks directly into the providers’ APIs so you don’t need to install their apps. The free experience was good enough for me that I was willing to fork out for the app, much cheaper in the long run than paying a monthly sub!
Tomorrow’s news: “Find out how - amazingly - ML models can break encryption with this one simple trick! NP hates it!”
True, the safest data is the one that never goes online! But realistically it’s a tradeoff between risk and convenience - you can self host your own off-site backup but it’s a lot less effort to use a cloud storage provider, both are much less risky than having no backup and losing everything if your drive fails or your house burns down. At least this way I need the provider or my PC to be compromised and the encryption to be broken. TBH if quantum computing suddenly starts breaking encryption everywhere then we’ll all have bigger problems like the collapse of every bank in the world!
Sign up for proton drive. screw dropbox
Nobody uses dropbox because they like dropbox. They use it because it’s usually the only such service supported by the stupid fucking app they need on the stupid fucking ipad their company insists they use which has no other viable way to put files on and off of the fucking cunting thing because apple is fucking stupid and so is this god damn company.
Someone once told the IT manager that apple devices are “the most secure” and he doesn’t even fucking realise that by forcing us to use fucking stupid third party fucking services like fucking dropbox to get files on and off that they are subjecting confidential commercial fucking information to being fucking exposed to third fucking party boneless fucking cunts.
As somebody that sometimes has to do ticket support, you would be surprises how many people have chosen drop box over SMB NFS or a sync client. Maybe because they or their IT didn’t have basic Shares knilowledge so DropBox was the simplest method they found.
DropBox nailed it in replicating all the Windows’s share sync features, but doing it over HTTP to a web server with a web interface without the need to have someone from IT set it up. They nailed it again by spreading to multiple platforms, particularly the mobile ones, which lets people access and use their files from anywhere. And then nailed it once more by introducing file version history.
At this point, yes, Windows has the same, or arguably more, features… but where those features really shine, is on mobile, and DropBox is king there, so it’s only natural that people would use it everywhere.
Obsidian user with self-maintained vault sync across MacOS, Android and Linux, reporting for duty! 🙄
Gave up on Google Drive, MacOS and Android worked perfectly, Linux was a complete pain and never got it working properly. Screw you, Google, get your shit together and support Linux, already! 😡
Gnome Desktop makes Google services easy. You go into accounts and add your google credentials, it then sets up Gdrive in file browser, email, and calendar for you. But even though I like Gnome i got rid of google since they suck now
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In its FAQ, Dropbox contradicts this claim, saying, “We won’t let our third-party partners train their models on our user data without consent.”
In July, the company announced an AI-powered feature called Dash that allows AI models to perform universal searches across platforms like Google Workspace and Microsoft Outlook.
Still, multiple Ars Technica staff who had no knowledge of the Dropbox AI alpha found the setting enabled by default when they checked.
It also says, “Only the content relevant to an explicit request or command is sent to our third-party AI partners to generate an answer, summary, or transcript.”
Log into your Dropbox account on a desktop web browser, then click your profile photo > Settings > Third-party AI.
On that page, click the switch beside “Use artificial intelligence (AI) from third-party partners so you can work faster in Dropbox” to toggle it into the “Off” position.
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