
Dropbox Beta Build 15.3.19 - tdkl
https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Desktop-client-builds/Beta-Build-15-3-19/m-p/194282#M3484
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new299
Dropboxes lack of transparency is particularly worrying because they have
board members who support warrentless surveillance.

In my mind Dropbox became a company not worth supporting when Rice joined
Dropbox's board ([http://www.drop-dropbox.com/](http://www.drop-
dropbox.com/)). Personally, with a board member who advocates warrentless
surveillance it seems unlikely that we share similar views on the security of
my data, and I wont be using their service.

Transparency in tech companies seems even more important with a Trump
administration on the horizon...

~~~
notheguyouthink
> Dropboxes lack of transparency is particularly worrying because they have
> board members who support warrentless surveillance.

Agreed. I switched away from Dropbox for that very reason. Granted, i'm not
liking the alternatives that much.

I've been planning to backup my home storage on "unsafe" providers
(Dropbox/etc) after encrypting it. Just as i would with a "dumb" storage
solution like S3/B2/etc.

Is there anything that might make encrypted data on Dropbox/GoogleDrive less
safe than the same data on S3?

> Transparency in tech companies seems even more important with a Trump
> administration on the horizon...

Heh.

~~~
jesseendahl
I'm not sure why it's not more well known, but Dropbox's actual track record
when it comes to this stuff is pretty strong.

From the EFF: "Dropbox earns five stars in this year’s Who Has Your Back
report. This is Dropbox’s fourth year in the report, and it has adopted every
best practice we’ve identified as part of this report. We commend Dropbox for
its strong stance regarding user rights, transparency, and privacy."

[https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-government-data-
reques...](https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-government-data-
requests-2015#dropbox-report)

Full disclosure: I used to work at Dropbox.

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tehabe
"Found several bugs and regressions in this build", could be one fitting
feedback.

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aftbit
Disclaimer: I'm an ex-Dropboxer. My opinions are my own.

I worked on the Desktop Client team. When I left Dropbox, the team was trying
to move to a 2 week build cycle. The big focus at Dropbox was to increase the
speed of iteration in order to get features and bugfixes in front of user eyes
as quickly as possible. One of the compromises there was to cut back on the
amount of time and energy the team spent on constructing public changelogs. I
wasn't a huge fan of this change, but I understand the argument that it's
probably better for the engineers and PMs to work on features and bugs than
public documentation for the beta builds.

There was also a faction that wanted to completely get rid of the forum
builds. Most of the engineers that I knew were strongly against this, as some
really valuable first-touch feedback came out of forum builds.

I'm not going to defend forced automatic updates, though. I lost that
argument, at least on Mac/Windows. :(

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jesseendahl
This seems more like "You're under no obligation to do so, but if you find
issues and want to report them, this is a place you can be sure we'll see it,
and we'll be thankful and look into it."

It would definitely be an improvement if change logs were posted as well, but
just having this venue alone seems like a net positive even without change
logs. Especially because (at least in this instance) an employee responded to
the reported issues quickly. This doesn't seem like something worth bringing
out the pitchforks over to me.

Definitely possible I'm just biased since I used to work there though. Curious
to hear what others think.

~~~
tdkl
The issue is that we users don't know what they'll bring in an update. And
mind you it's auto updated without warning, you have to basically rename
couple .exe files, disable some tasks in the Task Scheduler and Services on
Windows to stop the auto update. This combined with the notion you don't know
what changed is asinine.

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sctb
We've updated the title from “Dropbox doesn't write change logs for their
builds, but expects feedback”. You can't use Hacker News titles to
editorialize, and this has always been against the site guidelines.

It's absolutely fine to criticize Dropbox's development and release practices,
and content that stands alone (like a blog post) is the place to do it before
submitting it here for discussion.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

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jeffehobbs
This is a bad post. Why am I looking at this? Why should I care? Answer those
questions first.

