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I love Dropbox, but this kind of data-gathering without explicit permission is bananas. What I'd really love to see added to Dropbox is client-side encryption (i.e. I want to manage my own keys so nobody can monkey with my data). And yes, I know I can store an encrypted container inside Dropbox, but that defeats the purpose of easily accessing my data from every device.

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See https://cryptomator.org/

Didn't know about this. Thank you!

Dropbox may not natively add client side encryption in the near future. The way Dropbox has stored data from the beginning is by deduplicating information across all its users to save space. So if you upload a book or a movie or a song and I upload the same, Dropbox stores one single copy of it for the both of us.

This is just a simplified explanation. The actual deduplication is done in smaller blocks.

If you want client side encryption with Dropbox, you have to add a layer before the Dropbox client sees your files on your system, using Cryptomator or Boxcryptor or encrypted volumes with Veracrypt, etc.

Or you could switch to other online backup/sync services that claim to have client side encryption, like SpiderOak and a few others.

That's true, but I'm sure businesses (and many individuals) would pay a premium for native client-side encryption with keys they hold themselves.

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