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Comment by smackay | Hacker News Reader

Open Question: What's the consensus of opinion regarding Dropbox while they still have Condoleezza Rice on the Board of Directors?

Personally, I want to love them. I think Drew has built up a decent company. However choosing Dr. Rice for the board, although she probably brings a lot to the table, was an unforgivable act. The creation of the foundation is laudable but feels a bit of a band-aid to solving their image problem. The choice of War Child UK just rubs more salt into the wound for me however.

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Dropbox provides great value and I dearly miss it, but I can not support a company that willingly hosts a person so closely connected to illegitemate war and crimes against humanity. I doubt this has significance for Dropbox. It is more a matter of personal moral hygiene.

I don't think there's a consensus. I've stopped using Dropbox due to that choice, but their success tells me that this is not too problematic for most of their users. I think it's one of those things were the product is just too good for people to quit, even if they disagree with the business practices.

> I think it's one of those things were the product is just too good for people to quit, even if they disagree with the business practices.

This or most users don't even know/care about the company / software. They just installed it to solve a problem and it works fine

This may be highly anecdotal, but I’m a Dropbox user, live in the US, read HN probably daily, and still don’t know much about Condoleeza Rice or why it would be good or bad having her on the board.

Very much installed it to solve a problem and it works fine

(But now I guess i have some reading to do)

Some information is available here:

http://www.drop-dropbox.com

How would that be different from Mozilla's Brendan?

I'm not a Dropbox user, so I don't really have a stake in this fight, but I think it's pretty different. Eich using his personal resources to support a personal social/political cause is not at all the same as being a politician who was part of the senior executive circle of the Bush administration.

I also dropped dropbox because of that but I doubt it has much of an effect on their user base. Most people I know don't care that much (even people who care about politics)

I'm as critical of the Bush administration as anyone. But I think Condoleezza Rice is just too complicated a person to place her on a one-dimensional "evil scale" and boycott everything she touches.

I don’t trust her at all. I have more trust in Microsoft than her so I moved to OneDrive the moment it was announced she was joining Dropbox.

Moving to Microsoft due to Condoleezza Rice being hired by Dropbox makes absolutely no sense.

I'm not a US citizen, so I don't know about Condoleezza Rice and personally I don't care that much. But I do care about:

1. the Halloween documents

2. their NSA partnership

3. them being happy about censoring content on China's whims, which allegedly is also affecting international users

4. Windows 10 being a privacy nightmare

5. their ongoing racketeering practices, forcing a tax on Android phone makers for patents

Yes, please lecture me on how other companies are doing it too, blah, blah, I don't care as these are things that have a measurable impact on my everyday life.

Don't get me wrong, I'm actually not boycotting Microsoft, I just choose not to use them given the choice. And I would use OneDrive given its price, if it would be reliable, but it isn't. I tried it multiple times actually, always noticing unacceptable limitations or bugs.

And so your choice is dubious at best.

> And so your choice is dubious at best.

Never said I trust MS, just that I trust them more than Rice.

You don't trust one person on their board of directors more than all the confirmed things that the other poster mentioned about MS? That doesn't seem like a very well calculated choice.

Halloween documents?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

That was in 1998, give it a break.

I'm not saying that they're perfect now, but they're definitely better :)

It started in 1998. Related leaks continued until 2004 it seems.

Beside these, MS have been dragged to court multiple times for unethical business practices, on both side of the Atlantic, and were found guilty, again on both sides (so it's not merely "an EU witch hunt"). The last time that I know of was in 2016 for the "malware-like forced installation of Windows 10" case. Windows 10, supposedly their latest and best, being itself technically a spyware. They're an immoral company. "Definitely better", I think not.

Oh right, the "Microsoft changed" meme.

4 out of those 5 points are ongoing and highlight that in fact Microsoft has not changed, following the same pattern.

Plus I don't really care that it happened in 1998. Can't forgive that. Sorry.

In society when people hurt other people, usually relationships get broken indefinitely, we don't really forgive unless it's about family or close friends. I don't see why companies should be any less different.

As they say, don't do the crime, if you can't do the time. Maybe companies should think twice before doing shit.

I'm having trouble finding a single position of her that I agree with. I'm actually listening to Brahms now, to see if maybe her choice of favourite composer is at least sensible.

But I do get the impression that she's the kind of person that one can have a deep discussion with even while disagreeing; that her positions, while wrong, are within the realm of possibilities, especially given her rather impressive biography. In other words: she's frequently wrong, but she's not batshit crazy and filled with hate like the current administration.

On a more practical note: I doubt that a board member has the power needed to single-handedly set company policy in the way implied by the criticism. If anything, her appointment is more of a symptom of the problem.

I guess it is cooperation with the national security apparatus people are worried about? With the increased scrutiny post-Snowden, especially in the EU, I'm not sure how much leeway companies have left, anyway. Yes: Dropbox almost certainly cooperates when presented with a "National Security Letter". But I would take Rice to actually be more concerned about limiting her liability than, say, Yahoo, and push back at requests that are in legally grey areas.

> In other words: she's frequently wrong, but she's not batshit crazy and filled with hate like the current administration.

Is it really better if an intelligent person willingly helps start the Iraq war than if an hateful person does so on a whim? I find it hard to decide what's scarier.

I've stopped using Dropbox when they hired her, but not because I think there are practical implications for users. Rather, I wish that the IT community would finally, please, start thinking about ethics.

Yes, it is a lot better if an intelligent person willingly helps start that war. Intelligent people tend to be rational; they can be reasoned with. This means you might be able to convince them to change their mind. You can talk with them and figure out what is going on. You can explain to them why you disagree with their actions.

The real distinction that matters is how stubborn someone is, or how convinced they are that they are right. One might be stubborn out of hate, one might be stubborn out of pride (I loudly claimed X, so I must to all I can to show X is right, no matter what happens), or one might be stubborn out of 'true belief'. Such stubbornness is scary.

Notably, it is scary no matter whether you agree with them or not. Such stubbornness might help accelerate change if they are exactly right, but there is no room for error.

Good point about stubbornness, but rationality is not the same as benevolence. You can have rational, even entertaining discussions about the way in which you ruin things for your own self-interest.

I have a hard time believing that anyone in the Bush administration was acting in good faith and invaded a country because nobody raised a solid counter-argument in time.

Even people acting out of self-interest can be reasoned or at least bargained with. You can't do that with a 'true believer'.

There is no consensus opinion. The anti-war movement died with Obama's election. Since the consensus is that Trump worst president ever, actual crimes of previous administrations are irrelevant. Calling a country a shithole is worse than waging war against it, apparently.

Why? It has nothing to do with where you host your files. You just seem to be making a knee-jerk partisan reaction.

I think she is a remarkable woman, and anything that increases minority representation on company boards should be applauded.

> Open Question: What's the consensus of opinion regarding Dropbox while they still have Condoleezza Rice on the Board of Directors?

There is no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism. While I don't think this is excuse to just not give a flying f at all whatsoever, it sets a general expectation — I'm not going to pick what's worse, Rice in the Board of Directors or an NSA partnership or a plan to essentially _become_ the NSA, but for advertising.

One day I'll stop being lazy and make something that's independent from cloud providers (and thus their ethical issues) for myself. It will probably be less power efficient and thus contribute more to global warming, but at least I'll have tried - but, still, there is no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism.

There is no ethical consumption, as in consuming only from ethical companies. But come on, almost each and every one of us has a company (online and offline) that we're desperately trying to avoid whenever possible.

Reasons for that could be different, but ethical reasons are completely legit ones.

The main reason why I have a personal Nextcloud server is because I don't want to deal with considering pros and cons when choosing where to stash my most valuable data (like cloud service, calendar, contact lists, to-do lists etc).

Sure, it takes me maybe an hour per month to keep it updated, but constantly considering different options would take me even more. Sure, paying for a dedicated server takes a chunk of my monthly income, but it would also add up to pay monthly subscriptions to other bullshit SaaS, because free editions rarely allow a consumer to accomplish most of the things[0]. And as far as the climate change is concerned, my hosting provider is powered by a hydro plant. My hosting provider is also not from a five-eye country (nor does my everyday traffic reach any of those when traveling to my server and back) and is in the EU jurisdictions. I don't really have to worry about NSA that much, as long as I trust my end devices not making those connections with my most sensitive types of data.

With all that said, I do feel like an ethical consumer online. There are some hints of it outside the keyboard as well. Heck, I'm 23 and still haven't learned how to drive because it isn't viable to have an electric car inside of my country, and I prefer public transport over taxis and Uber.

[0] Shoutout to Pocket, the only SaaS I could think of that's completely usable in the free version, and becomes even more usable when paying for a premium.

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