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.
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.
Never said I trust MS, just that I trust them more than Rice.
I'm not saying that they're perfect now, but they're definitely better :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.