I don't know why Dropbox is catching so much flak for this when the TOS were standard stuff you see pretty much anywhere.<p>ex: <a href="http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS</a><p>“By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”<p>“You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.”
A privacy revolution would be to use client-side encryption on this sort of services, not change the TOS -- especially since questions about ownership of the data would become pretty irrelevant.
Since day one I've stored an arsenal of Truecrypt archives in my Dropbox folder for anything that I really don't want anyone else to find out about. (Not that there is much of that.) Most of the rest of what I store there is ebooks, university lecture notes, my portfolio, and other stuff that I wouldn't worry about if Dropbox really dropped the ball. Seems reasonable to me to be a little more in charge of your own security instead of handing off responsibility to people you don't even know. Still, I agree that we should be holding Dropbox (and similar services) to a high standard, and they have indeed stumbled on this issue.
> we won’t share your content with others, including law enforcement, for any purpose unless you direct us to.<p>So, they're somehow immune to subpoenas? How can this possibly work?<p>Or are they saying that since your data is encrypted, they couldn't provide the plaintext to the authorities even if they wanted to?
I always wondered why do we need all this legal bullshit... and I never liked the order of the words in these sentences...<p>If google has a button, that I press and my content becomes available to the whole world... it is me pressing the button.<p>It should be the other way around... or at least say: you as a user have the option to make your content available, modify your content, distribute or bla, bla, bla using our services... and you give no license to the provider.<p>ps: still... I don't care about these terms much, as they really appear everywhere. Although, I'd feel much better if using an online service, in legal terms would be closer to buying a tool in the hardware store. :)
I haven't really been following the Dropbox fiasco(s), mostly because I've been so happy over the last year with SpiderOak (<a href="https://spideroak.com/" rel="nofollow">https://spideroak.com/</a>). They go out of their way to put you in control of your data. They don't store any passwords whatsoever, encrypt everything, and have a strong zero-knowledge policy.