Dropbox Beta Build 15.3.19
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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...
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...
Heh.
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."
https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-government-data-reques...
Full disclosure: I used to work at Dropbox.
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. :(
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.
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.