This is deeply troubling. As a scientist who uses* Dropbox I gave no informed consent. I know they claim personally identifiable information was removed but still I gave no consent for this.
*not for long, perhaps
*not for long, perhaps
"Law & Order and the Public Interest. We may disclose your information to third parties if we determine that such disclosure is reasonably necessary to: (a) comply with any applicable law, regulation, legal process, or appropriate government request; (b) protect any person from death or serious bodily injury; (c) prevent fraud or abuse of Dropbox or our users; (d) protect Dropbox’s rights, property, safety, or interest; or (e) perform a task carried out in the public interest."
I would assume that this research fell under the "task carried out in the public interest" clause.
As in: a form asking the user if their information can be used in this way and giving them the possibility of opting out. Adding one more clause to the privacy policy doesn't count.
GDRP section 32
Consent should be given by a clear affirmative act establishing a freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject's agreement to the processing of personal data relating to him or her, such as by a written statement, including by electronic means, or an oral statement. This could include ticking a box when visiting an internet website, choosing technical settings for information society services or another statement or conduct which clearly indicates in this context the data subject's acceptance of the proposed processing of his or her personal data. Silence, pre-ticked boxes or inactivity should not therefore constitute consent. Consent should cover all processing activities carried out for the same purpose or purposes. When the processing has multiple purposes, consent should be given for all of them. If the data subject's consent is to be given following a request by electronic means, the request must be clear, concise and not unnecessarily disruptive to the use of the service for which it is provided.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=15323486...
Am I mis-understanding?
My guess is that they are using provision of service as the legal basis for processing, whilst relying upon the "public interest" clause in the ToS to justify the sub-processing by the third party.
There's some public interest exceptions, but from my knowledge it's not established that stuff like this would work under it.
It seems to me that an organisation the size of Dropbox would have a fairly watertight justification. However if the legal basis for processing is neither consent nor provision of service, then they must have done a pretty good job of obfuscating all PII (as the article says "...we and Dropbox employees could view no personally identifiable information.". If this is the case then this sharing of information may not even be in-scope of GDPR.
I'm not sure if the public interest exceptions would be a safe route to go down. The EU has made it clear that, like 'Legitimate Interest', the get-out-of-jail-free justification is going to be highly scrutinised.
EDIT: I have just seen that the article has been edited to say that the anonymisation and aggregation was carried out by Dropbox before being transferred to the third party, which kind of kills the discussion.
For the record: I'm not suggesting that what they did was ok, just trying to think about it from a GDPR perspective. Anonymising account information is great and all, but how can you be sure you've obfuscated all PII from information saved to file storage, unless you audit all that information - which in and of itself seems ropey from a data protection point of view.
It seems hardly necessary to share data with HBR so that Dropbox can offer file-sharing services...
Based on my reading here: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-da... this does not apply.
However, to answer your question anyway - I don't believe you could justify the work as being in the public interest. I think it would be an extremely tenuous link and I think you'd be a fool to try and rely on something as flimsy as public interest if you're not a government body, or processing data on behalf of one.
I suppose I was taking a stab at understanding what their thinking was to see if anyone else could provide me with something which I had not considered.
"The principles of data protection should therefore not apply to anonymous information, namely information which does not relate to an identified or identifiable natural person or to personal data rendered anonymous in such a manner that the data subject is not or no longer identifiable. This Regulation does not therefore concern the processing of such anonymous information, including for statistical or research purposes." [1]
If you don't want your information accessed--run your own servers, people. That's your only option.
But seriously, as an example, I know people that share sensitive personal information with their accountants at tax time using Dropbox. Would suck for any of that to be made available to any third parties.
Then imagine you have a second folder with 117 subfolders with another pattern like above.
Now imagine that the first folder structure matches a torrent of embarrassing pornography and the second appears to be a superset of a project published to GitHub under your name (i.e. with some directories being gitignored)
I've stored non anoynmized data on Dropbox as part of my own research. IRB gave me permission to keep that data and my consent form explained it to participants. We were all working under the assumption this type of sharing by Dropbox was impossible. My school's IRB does not allow the use of Google drive for nonanonymized data storage based on just this type of concern.