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Our Commitment to your Rights and Privacy
- joelgrus 13y agoWe should have been clearer that none of this is going to change with Dr. Rice’s appointment to our Board. i.e. "We should have been clearer about how this isn't what it looks like."
- mikeash 13y ago"Dr. Rice understands our stance on these issues and fully supports our commitments to our users." There are three possible things this could mean: 1. Rice has changed her mind about NSA surveillance. 2. Dropbox's commitments to their users do not include attempting to defend their data from government surveillance. 3. This statement is full of crap. I'm guessing 3, but 2 is also likely. 1 does not seem to be the one to bet on.
- tylerkahn 13y agoHow about: 1. Rice wasn't brought on for anything that has to do with data privacy and thus her views on data privacy are irrelevant. 2. Rice doesn't have an uncontrollable compulsion to send people's data to the NSA and thus it's unlikely she'll be sneaking off to install backdoors.
- mikeash 13y agoBoth of those would mean that Rice's appointment to Dropbox's board is no big deal, but neither one is compatible with their statement that she "fully supports our commitments".
- tylerkahn 13y agoIt is a big deal, just not from your perspective because you're solely focused on data privacy. The statement is meant to address the data privacy concerns raised about her appointment. This doesn't mean the concerns are valid, just that they exist and Dropbox is aware of them. The alternative would be to not address the concerns and look completely out of touch with or intentionally ignoring the frenzy of the past few days.
- mikeash 13y agoI have no idea how that's supposed to relate to my statement. I'm just saying that their statement (not the appointment, but what they said right here) is completely at odds with the notion that they care about the privacy of their users. That's all I'm saying. I'm not focused on data privacy, I'm merely noting that this statement appears to either contradict the facts at hand or be an implicit admission that they don't care about data privacy.
- tylerkahn 13y agoOh ok. I think you're saying that because you think that Rice believes [something bad with respect to data privacy], by Dropbox saying that she's fully supportive of their commitments Dropbox must also believe in [something bad with respect to data privacy]. So I guess that comes down to what Rice's exact views are. Personally, I doubt she's completely against the idea of data privacy in all cases and thus it's possible that Dropbox's existing views and policies on data privacy are compatible with hers. And anyway, I doubt that Dropbox could or would stop responding to FISA requests or warrants regardless of who's on the board considering that they operate in the US.
- mikeash 13y agoRice's exact views don't seem too difficult to figure out. She spoke publicly in favor of warrantless surveillance of US citizens. It's possible that she's subsequently changed her mind, which is why I included that possibility as point #1 above. FISA requests and warrants aren't really at issue here. Warrants are exactly how this stuff is supposed to be done. FISA requests are pretty much just an odd form of warrant, and any opposition to them comes down to thinking they shouldn't be issued, not that they shouldn't be obeyed. The issue at hand is warrantless surveillance. Does Dropbox hand over user data to the government without a warrant? If not, given that Rice is in favor of such things and Dropbox says she fully supports their commitments, there is a contradiction somewhere.
- tzs 13y agoOr 4. She understand sDropbox's commitments and has committed to advise them how they can act in accord those commitments while simultaneously believing that NSA surveillance is justified. That is quite believable. Heck, lawyers do things like that all the time--advise someone on how to act in accord with that person's interests and principles, even if those conflict with the lawyer's interests or principles. This ability is not limited to lawyers. Besides lawyers, this is often done by people who manage the financial accounts of others, by people who manage the health care of others, and by people who accept positions as outside directors on the boards of companies.
- mikeash 13y agoTo me, that doesn't fit with "fully supports our commitments." "Supports" means approval, not just duty. Perhaps I'm reading too much into the language.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- UVB-76 13y agoA completely botched response from Dropbox. They had two options: 1. Disregard the concerns raised as those of a vocal minority, while the overwhelming majority of their users are apathetic about Rice's appointment; refuse to legitimize the concerns by publicly acknowledging them and wait for the whole thing to blow over; 2. Acknowledge the concerns as legitimate, and damaging to users' trust in their business; as a business that depends so heavily on the trust of its users, admit an error of judgment and remove Rice from the board. Instead, they have legitimized and publicized the concerns, but are refusing to do anything about it. They're going to get a kicking for this. Someone pass the popcorn?
- azth 13y agoFurthermore, by making a blog post about it, it seems that they have pushed more of their userbase to delete their accounts (judging by reading the comments section on the blog post).
- notdonspaulding 13y agohttp://i.imgur.com/agJIP.gif http://i.imgur.com/agJIP.gif Drew Houston must not know how this works. You can't placate the SV Business Morality Police with words. Only heads on a platter will satisfy.
- higherpurpose 13y agoYou're committed to my privacy? How about that 1-click client-side encryption button that I've been asking of you for the past 2 years? How about a zero-knowledge policy? Let me know when these are in effect, and then I'll know you're "committed to my privacy", and not just paying lip service to it to gain PR points.
- res0nat0r 13y agoThey can't implement with most likely totally changing their expenses in a big way. They dedupe content before storing it in s3, totally encrypting would most likely cause these prices to skyrocket.
- mercurial 13y agoIt could perfectly well be a premium feature.
- res0nat0r 13y agoSure, but most likely that would cause a huge engineering effort and they probably want to focus on keeping their core product as is and as easy to use as possible.
- mercurial 13y agoDo you mean Dropbox is not as committed to privacy as the statement makes them out to be?
- res0nat0r 13y agoThey are committed to privacy, he just stated so in the link. Just that they aren't SpiderOak and aren't going to encrypt all of your data client side before uploading it. That would require changing their entire architecture and they aren't going to do so.
- bowlofpetunias 13y agoObviously Rice won't change much about Dropbox policy and practices either way. I don't think that's really the problem here. The problem here is what kind of ethics, common sense, or both we can expect from a company who puts somebody on their board who as far as the majority of the population of this planet is concerned should be standing trial for crimes against humanity.
- mpyne 13y ago> who as far as the majority of the population of this planet is concerned should be standing trial for crimes against humanity. What did she in particular do that would meet that bill, besides agree to serve in the Bush Administration? Can we at least wait a couple of weeks between witchhunts in the tech industry?
- jqm 13y agoDidn't Bush himself say "just following orders isn't an excuse"?
- mercurial 13y agoNobody will deny her experience in the "expand into new countries" bullet point, at least. They should get Putin on board as well, I'm told he too has an impressive CV and a big address book.
- bowlofpetunias 13y agoThat's probably the most painful wording they could have put in their statement. Certain people at Dropbox seem to have lost touch with reality. Even if you want to defend the appointment of Rice, you have to be insanely insensitive to refer to international expansion as a motive.
- MatthiasP 13y agoThe clumsiness of Drew's statement does remind me of those from the Bush Administration when they started to explain why the US Army wasn't exactly greeted with flowers by the Iraqis. Condoleeza will have to do a lot of work to win the "hearts and minds" of the users.
- anonbanker 13y agoI bet Karl Rove is available, too.
- johnvschmitt 13y ago"Trust us". Yes, I trust that you revealed your real position. Gaining marketshare is more important to you than user data privacy. Got it!
- agarwlGaurav 13y agoDropbox guys cannot be trusted therefore I have simply deleted the account.
- jhack 13y agoThey seem to have completely missed the point.
- k-mcgrady 13y ago>> "There’s nothing more important to us than keeping your stuff safe and secure. It’s why we’ve been fighting for transparency and government surveillance reform, and why we’ve been vocal and public with our principles and values." Ok, so you believe government surveillance needs reformed. Why should you (dropbox) or we (the public) trust the woman who was part of creating that very government surveillance??
- jqm 13y agoDropbox has probably freed up a Petabyte of disk space from free-loading geeks over the past two days. In other words, Rice has probably already paid for herself many times over. (Actually, I think the crew behind the Iraq war shouldn't be on any boards but rather in prison. This isn't a political issue in my mind but rather a criminal one. Killing over 100,000 on false pretenses is well beyond the pale of what civilization should allow.)
- Dewie 13y agoAre geeks more likely to be free users of DropBox than non-geeks?
- jqm 13y agoI don't know. But I do suspect the geek is more likely to be aware of Rice's appointment and close their account over it. After all, the geek has options.
- Dewie 13y agoSo let's assume that a geek user is just as likely to be a free user as a non-geek user[]. Then, the geeks leaving their service is a net loss to them, because how would it not be that? If it really was the case that geeks leaving the service was a net win to them, then their whole user base - which you'll recall, we assume has the same proportion to free to non-free users as the geek subset - is a net loss to them, either right now or overall, violating the more fundamental assumption that dropbox has a self-serving business model. Thus we have arrived at a contradiction, forcing us to accept that geeks leaving the service is a net loss to dropbox. We don't consider the case where geek users are more likely to have a non-free plan than non-geek users, since then that is obviously a net loss to dropbox if they leave, under the reasonable assumption that paying users of dropbox are more profitable to dropbox then their free user brethren. The last possibility, that non-geek users are more likely to be paying users than geek users, is no more likely than the two scenarios above, according to your own knowledge. So why did you assert that geek users are a net loss to dropbox to begin with? [] and also that these two sets of users is a partitioning of the whole set of users.
- mindcrime 13y agoI'm not even going to get into the politics here, but I'll just say this: If you aren't happy with Dropbox, here's something to look at. http://www.owncloud.org http://www.owncloud.org or https://github.com/haiwen/seafile https://github.com/haiwen/seafile
- mkal_tsr 13y agoI deleted my DropBox and moved my stuff over to SpiderOak.
- Dewie 13y agoQ: will boycotting Dropbox even matter if you're a free user?
- spathi_fwiffo 13y agoprobably make them happy. Could just fill up to your quota with garbage.
- amirmc 13y agoWould have to be unique garbage, such that de-duping isn't possible.
- AmarJayR 13y agoGreat idea actually. Someone should make a project for this.
- Dewie 13y agoI'm game. What's a good way to make a script that intelligently creates garbage data, so that the daemon has to keep syncing with the server? Try to make it look decently random? I don't know how smart the dropbox daemon is.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- em3rgent0rdr 13y agoI'm switching to git-annex assist https://git-annex.branchable.com https://git-annex.branchable.com
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jqm 13y agoSeriously... this is like appointing Pat Robertson to the head of the California Porn Producers Association. It is just about that stupid. Maybe stupider. Or else there is a whole lot I really don't understand and the managers of Dropbox do.
- apta 13y agoWhy do they feel a need to make a post about this if they are already honored by her joining?