
Our Commitment to your Rights and Privacy - _dark_matter_
https://blog.dropbox.com/2014/04/our-commitment-to-your-rights-and-privacy/
======
UVB-76
A 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
Furthermore, 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).

------
k-mcgrady
>> "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??

------
mikeash
"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
How 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
Both 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
It 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
I 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
Oh 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
Rice'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.

------
mercurial
Nobody 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
That'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.

------
jqm
Dropbox 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
Are geeks more likely to be free users of DropBox than non-geeks?

~~~
jqm
I 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
So 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.

~~~
jqm
I don't have to assume.

In this case I can sample. Now, my sample size isn't very large, in fact it's
just one person... me.

I had a free account and I closed it. I doubt they care.

But don't you think you are taking a comment made largely in jest just a bit
too seriously?

~~~
Dewie
> I don't have to assume.

In this case I can sample. Now, my sample size isn't very large, in fact it's
just one person... me.

Ah, yes. Very cute. Doesn't make a lick of sense. But cute.

> But don't you think you are taking a comment made largely in jest just a bit
> too seriously?

It's funny how, when something does not hold up to scrutiny, it was all just a
joke all along. Then the person that performed the scrutiny was just an
uptight person that couldn't take a joke. Yes. Very convenient.

~~~
jqm
A downvote Dewie?

Really? That's your "scrutiny"?

~~~
Dewie
I can't downvote posts which are replies to one of my own posts.

~~~
jqm
Oh. Looks like someone supports your position then:)

------
bowlofpetunias
Obviously 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
> 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?

~~~
bowlofpetunias
She didn't just "serve" in the Bush administration as the f-ing Whitehouse
receptionist.

She was a prominent and powerful part of that administration, and as such
participated actively in the WMD deception and the use of torture.

If the US wasn't the most powerful nation on the planet she would be in a jail
cell in The Hague right now.

Completely ignoring what one may personally think of her, what kind of company
would put someone like that on the board?

(Also, do you really not get the irony of using the term "witch hunt" given
the actions of the so-called "victims" here?)

~~~
azth
The real victims are already dead :(

------
higherpurpose
You'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
They 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
It could perfectly well be a premium feature.

~~~
res0nat0r
Sure, 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
Do you mean Dropbox is not as committed to privacy as the statement makes them
out to be?

~~~
res0nat0r
They 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.

~~~
mercurial
It was tongue-in-cheek. If Amnesty International hired Donald Rumsfeld for his
organizational abilities, most people would question their commitment to
protecting human rights.

~~~
res0nat0r
Sure but Dropbox is in the business of syncing files unlike AI.

------
joelgrus
_We 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."

------
mindcrime
I'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)

------
agarwlGaurav
Dropbox guys cannot be trusted therefore I have simply deleted the account.

------
jqm
Seriously... 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.

------
jhack
They seem to have completely missed the point.

------
mkal_tsr
I deleted my DropBox and moved my stuff over to SpiderOak.

------
em3rgent0rdr
I'm switching to git-annex assist [https://git-
annex.branchable.com](https://git-annex.branchable.com)

------
apta
Why do they feel a need to make a post about this if they are already honored
by her joining?

------
johnvschmitt
"Trust us".

Yes, I trust that you revealed your real position.

Gaining marketshare is more important to you than user data privacy.

Got it!

------
Dewie
Q: will boycotting Dropbox even matter if you're a free user?

~~~
spathi_fwiffo
probably make them happy. Could just fill up to your quota with garbage.

~~~
amirmc
Would have to be unique garbage, such that de-duping isn't possible.

~~~
AmarJayR
Great idea actually. Someone should make a project for this.

