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?
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).
>> "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??
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or 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.
To 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.
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.
The 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.
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.)
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.
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.
Do you really think I claim to know how much space drop box freed up or that I propose in reality the reason they hired Rice is to free that space up?
You seem to want to argue so let me indulge you....
I postulate geeks are more likely to use Dropbox's free service than non-geeks. Why?
1) They are better informed of alternative options and thus less likely to pay as they can spread their files out over multiple free services.
2) They have less trouble implanting multiple file storage options. Non-geeks are more likely to be intimidated by this and thus pay for the "name brand" and "what they know" option.
3) Geeks are known to be cheap. (ok... say "Cute" again).
4) I can keep going if you want.
I think all this pretty clearly indicates my original point was valid. And this ridiculous thread indicates someone needs to spend less time on the computer and stop picking pepper out of flypoop.
As for hiring Rice... ya, that seems like a bad idea on Dropbox's part.
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.
> 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?
When the Allies charged prominent Nazis with war crimes, it was because of their specific involvement in such crimes, not just because they had committed the heinous crime of "being an infamous Nazi".
Being a key member of an administration that engaged in torture, domestic surveillance and starting a war of aggression is pretty egregious. She wasn't just filling a seat. You can see her statements supporting torture for instance.
And, most especially in the case of Rice/Dropbox the issue is support for warrentless surveillance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'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.
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?