I've deleted my Dropbox account

The Dropbox case is an excellent learning opportunity.

They have created a long needed seamless service, approaching quickly a huge number of people praising them nearly religiously, as well as exceptionally good press. Then, surprisingly, it took them few months to revert their perception completely.

To put aside whether they should receive so harsh words now, I think that all startup founders, and managers, should try to understand what happened, in order to avoid similar mistakes.

I do not have a clear answer but I do not think it is only a matter of unclear Terms of Service, or blog posts. If I would have to guess, they have overpromised hugely.

For everyone with a basic understanding of security, it's obvious that no remote storage can be both extremely secure and so easy to use on so many channels. The idea of managing encryption private keys is beyond regular users' intuition.

If I'm right, the best thing they could have done was stating clearly, from the beggining, that the data is as secure as possile, and they do their best to ensure (as I'm sure they do), but it will not be a military grade. The latest authentication bug did not help, too.

With the previous bold security statements, likely slightly misunderstood by a less tech savvy folks, it's not a suprirse that some of their users feel angry and feel somehow cheated.

What is very odd, the security itself was never Dropbox's the most important feature. The easy to use interface, and seamless synchronization between on many channels, was.

That's a pretty knee-jerk reaction given the reason those terms were added. If you are going to provide a service that publishes content for other people, you better have the right to publish that content.

And sharing your folder or document to somebody else on the web is Dropbox publishing your content for you.

There are lots of reasons to drop your Dropbox account. This is not one of them.

It's surprising he'd be so naive as to think this is anything other than the sort of boilerplate companies always put in their TOS.

I like Dropbox, and I can tolerate Dave. But why this is important?

I don't own the copyright to everything in my Dropbox drive, and therefore cannot license it to Dropbox. I'd imagine most of their users are in the same boat.