

I've deleted my Dropbox account - DanLivesHere
http://scripting.com/stories/2011/07/03/imDeletingMyDropboxAccount.html

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maurycy
The Dropbox case is an excellent learning opportunity.

They have created a long needed seamless service, approaching quickly a huge
number of people praising them nearly religiously, as well as exceptionally
good press. Then, surprisingly, it took them few months to revert their
perception completely.

To put aside whether they should receive so harsh words now, I think that all
startup founders, and managers, should try to understand what happened, in
order to avoid similar mistakes.

I do not have a clear answer but I do not think it is only a matter of unclear
Terms of Service, or blog posts. If I would have to guess, they have
overpromised hugely.

For everyone with a basic understanding of security, it's obvious that no
remote storage can be both extremely secure and so easy to use on so many
channels. The idea of managing encryption private keys is beyond regular
users' intuition.

If I'm right, the best thing they could have done was stating clearly, from
the beggining, that the data is as secure as possile, and they do their best
to ensure (as I'm sure they do), but it will not be a military grade. The
latest authentication bug did not help, too.

With the previous bold security statements, likely slightly misunderstood by a
less tech savvy folks, it's not a suprirse that some of their users feel angry
and feel somehow cheated.

What is very odd, the security itself was never Dropbox's the most important
feature. The easy to use interface, and seamless synchronization between on
many channels, was.

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SoftwareMaven
That's a pretty knee-jerk reaction given the reason those terms were added. If
you are going to provide a service that publishes content for other people,
you better have the right to publish that content.

And sharing your folder or document to somebody else on the web is Dropbox
publishing your content for you.

There are lots of reasons to drop your Dropbox account. This is not one of
them.

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StacyC
I agree. Seems a little impetuous given what we know at this point, but maybe
I'm naive in my tendency to trust the Dropbox leadership thus far.

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pg
It's surprising he'd be so naive as to think this is anything other than the
sort of boilerplate companies always put in their TOS.

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michaelcampbell
Given his history and employment, I'd say he isn't. I suspect it's less about
him dropping Dropbox than him letting everyone KNOW he dropped Dropbox.

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kacy
I like Dropbox, and I can tolerate Dave. But why this is important?

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sjs382
I don't own the copyright to everything in my Dropbox drive, and therefore
cannot license it to Dropbox. I'd imagine most of their users are in the same
boat.

~~~
jacob_riis
That's right.

