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Now only if they launch an email service of their own and integrate Dropbox with it for stuff like attachments and we will have a potential GMail killer.
by ishansharma 14y ago
Now only if they launch an email service of their own and integrate Dropbox with it for stuff like attachments and we will have a potential GMail killer.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- kmfrk 14y agoWell, if my files still map to a checksum hash that is compared to other's files for storage redundancy, I'll stay with Gmail for the privacy.
- SimonPStevens 14y agoI think this statement really shows how our expectations of privacy have changed. You'd prefer GMail for it's privacy - That's the mail service that 'reads' your email and displays adverts based on it's content. Google clearly have the ability to access the plain text of your email so I'd be really surprised if they don't do some kind of storage de-duplication too. (Unless of course you were being ironic and I misread you)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ceejayoz 14y agoThere's no reason to believe that Gmail doesn't do the same thing for attachments. It's entirely possible they dedupe in the same manner.
- ljlolel 14y agoOne of Larry Page's earliest papers is about dedup. Google itself has published papers on email deduplication.
- wangweij 14y agoWhen Dropbox sees a dup, it does not upload the file at all and therefore you know there is a dup. If I understand correctly, Gmail always uploads the attachment. When there is a dup Google saves storage space. Users will never noticed any difference.
- ceejayoz 14y agoThat just makes the potential privacy violation undetectable, though. Doesn't remove it in any way.
- spullara 14y agoAny email service that isn't deduping attachments is being fiducially irresponsible.
- mikeash 14y agoWhy is that a problem? With something like Dropbox itself, there's potentially timing info exposed that would let you discover if someone else already had stored that file. But surely e-mail is far too asynchronous for that, and obliterates any timing information.
- spencerfry 14y agoWe can hope!
- dfischer 14y agoGoogle does that with Drive already.
- nilved 14y agoI think most other people would call that feature creep. The day Dropbox does anything more than sync files is the day I stop using Dropbox.
- jostmey 14y agoI don't care if new features continually creep into Dropbox, so long as the service is kept simple and invisible. The Dropbox service, I suspect, is super-super-super-super-super-super-super-super-super complicated. But Dropbox made file syncing so simple that the software is essentially invisible to the end-user. I believe it is possible for Dropbox to continue adding new feature while keeping their service relatively invisible. The multi-billion dollar question is will they.