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Comment by bigstrat2003 | Hacker News Reader

bigstrat2003·

I left Dropbox when they added (and preemptively enabled) a checkbox that shared your data with them for AI training. I refuse to do business with a company that will just unilaterally invade my privacy like that. They can make it as cheap as they want, I'll never go back.

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Selling data is always the last play for all businesses that have data.

Either you never give it to them in a way that can be sold (e.g. fully encrypted), or you expect them to sell it when the leaders need to increase cash flow.

Citation please, about Dropbox training models with customer data?

I think this is what people are talking about? RE: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38684252

https://help.dropbox.com/view-edit/privacy-settings-dropbox-...

> “For eligible accounts, […] The Third-party AI toggle is turned on”

I just logged in and checked and don't have the "Third-Party AI features" tab, but I only have an old free account and am probably not at the tier where this appears.

That feature doesn't train the model on customer's data though, unless I'm missing something.

I agree it's annoying it was enabled by default in places, but I'm trying to either correct the incorrect "for AI training" part, or find a citation that shows they are actually doing AI training with it.

The article Lammy linked is indeed the correct one. When that bit of news came out I checked my account, and it turned out that Dropbox had added and enabled the toggle without my consent. I was a paying customer mind you, I paid like $120/yr for my storage. After they pulled that crap I started working on setting up Nextcloud hosted in a VPS. It's more expensive, but Dropbox permanently burned my trust when they did what they did.

did you manage to catch it before they started the policy?

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