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/). 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...
> 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...
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."
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. :(
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.
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.
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.
In my mind Dropbox became a company not worth supporting when Rice joined Dropbox's board (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...