I think most of us, if we were developing Dropbox, would have made the same decisions. De-duping at the cost of complete privacy, even in the face of law, is a

I think most of us, if we were developing Dropbox, would have made the same decisions. De-duping at the cost of complete privacy, even in the face of law, is a sound technical and business decision for a service such as Dropbox. When I think Dropbox, I think sharing, I think convenience, I don't think backup and security. For backup I need more space, for security I need to use my own private key (not a password that one can change/recover). Neither of these things is offered by Dropbox. And this is the reason why I never confused Dropbox with, say, CrashPlan. One is a way to share and collaborate, the other is a place to send my private key encrypted bits to. My individual privacy is not compromised by somebody being able to say if a certain file is stored by the entirety of Dropbox user base. The other claim, that, given a court order, Dropbox can be forced to turn over your files or tell the court if you store a certain file _may_ be true, but I don't think Dropbox, the company, has ever promised that level of security.