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Dropbox Can't See Your Dat– Er, Never Mind

Posted by timothy on from the get-marketing-legal-and-the-engineers-in-here dept.

bizwriter writes "Dropbox, the online backup and file sharing service claims to have hit 25 million users in a single year. But a change in terms, noting that Dropbox will give up data to law enforcement under a legal request, showed that the company's security claims couldn't be possible. It turns out that Dropbox claims in one place that encrypted data makes it impossible for employees to see into user files, but in another says that they're only 'prohibited' from doing so."

4 of 333 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Who "owns" the data? by Spad · · Score: 3, Interesting

    When you put you belongings in a safety deposit box, do they belong to you or to the person/company that actually owns the safety deposit box?

  2. Re:No problem by flappinbooger · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Just Encrypt it

    The parent comment is underrated. Dropbox is a very good service, and I don't see why this new revelation of theirs couldn't be properly handled by just encrypting everything you put on it - yourself.

    So if you become a person of interest, and the powers that be make DB cough up your filez, they still won't see anything because YOU encrypted it too.

    Anyone have any suggestions on a quick and painless encryption product or approach to apply to your dropbox folders? I use DB extensively, have a lot of extra free space, and I don't fancy a 5 GB truecrypt file. I imagine a bunch of small truecrypt files would be a pain as well.

    --
    Flappinbooger isn't my real name
  3. Are we getting fewer mod points? by Nimey · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Seems like in the past few days I've seen fewer and fewer posts modded up or down.

    --
    Hail Eris, full of mischief...

    E pluribus sanguinem
  4. Re:the love of cloud by DrXym · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Everyday I get a corporate client asking me why they can't just do all their work on the cloud. Here's the perfect reason why.

    Well it's not a perfect reason. Many companies traditionally send their backup tapes or their shred bins or boxes of old files to an operator like Iron Mountain to store / destroy them. I expect Iron Mountain would comply with a court order just as readily as a cloud operator. I suppose with cloud operators the jurisdictions are more likely to differ which could be considered an advantage or not depending on why the court order is being served.

    It's certainly an important consideration though. I think in either case if you're paranoid about your data you encrypt it first.