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Comment by zkms | Hacker News Reader

> Dropbox gave us access to project-folder-related data, which we aggregated and anonymized, for all the scientists using its platform over the period from May 2015 to May 2017 — a group that represented 1,000 universities. This included information on a user’s total number of folders, folder structure, and shared folder access

This seems like heaven for industrial espionage purposes. Just because there's some anonymisation doesn't mean that the metadata is useless. I sincerely hope they get GDPR'd over this.

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If it's complete "folder structure" tree data with names removed, that could potentially be matched against public repositories that contain the same folders, like posted Zip files, GitHub projects or university web space, to identify some of the users.

From there, you could potentially identify other tools those people are using or embarrassing folder structures (e.g., deep folder tree structures people used to use to primitively conceal porn and other secret files, or signature folder structures for embarrassing repositories like erotica archives, collections of extremist literature, or piracy tools).

Hopefully they'll release more info and some sample files (like for themselves).

> Just because there's some anonymisation

"which we [...] anonymized" doesn't sound like there was any anonymisation.

It is only data from universities, not real for-profit businesses.

ha. Have you seen what some countries charge for tuition.

University administrators are not shareholders! Their greed is much better for society...

Why the heck would an administrator care if they 'hold shares' when they are pulling 200k-500k per year as base pay?

Ouch! Is "greed" a bad word? It's not an inaccurate one...

> It is only data from universities, not real for-profit businesses.

Plenty of universities work (often in collaboration with national laboratories and/or with corporations) on work that's far more important and critical than many "real for-profit businesses".

This is not better or worse. It's just as bad. Do you not think universities handle sensitive information?

A large part of what universities do is research in consultation with businesses and especially governments. It's not just teaching students; in many universities, that's only a small fraction of what the staff do.

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