Exactly, as a paying user having the option to disable telemetry is not unreasonable.
Too bad Dropbox does not see it that way.
Too bad Dropbox does not see it that way.
It's a shame. I wish more engineers would see things through Richard Stallman's eyes, and realize that software is supposed to serve its users, not its creators. But, as the saying goes: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Nonetheless, the potential is there and GDPR does consider it personal data from the point of view of consent, so dropbox is almost certainly violating the rules here even if they do not sell the data for advertising (as unlike the actual data they store, it is not necessary for providing the service, merely useful to the company for improving their service). Such telemetry almost certainly requires an opt-out, and most likely should be an opt-in as far as GDPR is concerned.
There was an opt-out telemetry proposal in Go [0], which caused a huge backlash. The proposal authors were so focused on the benefits of the telemetry, that they did their best to invent all kinds of very convincing arguments why their telemetry is okay, useful, not intrusive, etc. etc. They completely ignored the ethics of the problem - that they are not entitled to users' data without consent.
It took a very dramatic reaction from the community to convince them that adding opt-out telemetry without users' explicit consent is a bad idea, no matter how "non-intrusive" and "helpful" it is.
To bad they just start scanning everything in ~/Dropbox.