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Comment by qwerta | Hacker News Reader

Yet another reason not to use cloud services. For start dropbox is infrastructure provider and they have no right to snoop inside your files. If they start blocking stuff at their own will they are judge and executor.

Secondly there is lot of potential for abuse. Hacker could sneak hash collision into their database and essentially censor-ship any document he wants.

And finally I do not understand why there has to be protection from working with copyrighted stuff. Most of work I created is copyrighted, nearly every open-source product have copyright.

Even if there would be a movie there, it does not strictly mean it is illegal. Most people have right to create backups of their DVDs. Many jurisdictions allow to create copy for personal use and so on.

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"For start dropbox is infrastructure provider and they have no right to snoop inside your files."

Uh sure they do. Both legally and morally. It's their servers! Their right to snoop files stored on their servers is quite strong. Your right to store files on someone else's servers is zero. If you would like to pay someone to store your stuff on their servers that is a business deal which can be arranged and the fine print can be negotiated between the two private parties.

But it is not their data...

If you don't want someone looking at your data then you probably shouldn't store it on their servers. Especially when the contract you entered with that person says they they can snoop the data.

You could try negotiating a contract that says you can store your data on their servers but they aren't allowed to look at that data under any circumstances ever.

There are a variety of Dropbox competitors that focus on letting you run the server so you can control the data. If data privacy is of maximum concern, and that is a legitimate thing to be concerned about, then I'd recommend one of those options.

What if I transmit data over someone else's wires? Do they have the legal and moral right to snoop at it?

What if it's stored within a government's territorial jurisdiction? Do they have the legal and moral right to snoop?

Why not?

Yes to both, save for the limitations these parties themselves agree to. That is, after all, what the 4th amendment is: a limitation on the United States' sovereign rights.

I don't think what you're arguing would be a problem. From the article:

"Only when a file is shared from user-to-user (or with the Internet at large) does the DMCA check system come into play"

"Some thought the original file was deleted from the user’s Dropbox — that’s not the case, either. Dropbox just blocks the file from being shared."

Personally I think cloud services are super convenient and the downside for most people is really small.

My answer is in other thread, but in short my comment does apply even to sharing.

> they have no right to snoop inside your files

The do. Read the TOS, it's written in perfectly understandable english. If you accepted them, then you have nothing to say.

You clearly didn't read the article. It only applies to sharing files, not storing them. All of your arguments do not apply to shared files.

It does apply, there is no evidence that receiver does not have a valid license. It could be even the same person using two accounts.

By this logic we should shutdown Github and SourceForge, until we "clear up some legal stuff".

I agree with you that there are cases in which Dropbox might pick up false positives. I think the DMCA should be updated with harsher penalties for improper takedown requests ("copyfraud"). Still, the policy Dropbox has seems pretty reasonable. And you can always choose to encrypt your files locally or even not use Dropbox. After all, it's a company competing in a relatively free market. But I think for most people Dropbox is a pretty good choice and this takedown policy shouldn't be a reason for them to stop using it.

I agree their policy is reasonable for filesharing service.. But it makes dropbox useless for me as backup storage or hosting provider. I would not trust filesystem or provider which randomly deletes/blocks my data.

It makes sense that Dropbox wants to avoid the popularity that would come from being an easy way to distribute unauthorized content.

However, takedown notices have been abused on YouTube to censor criticism, and dishonestly claim ownership. The problem could be even worse if what it covered wasn't limited to when links are posted publicly, but also covered shares between family members, colleagues, and friends.

While distributing backups from your DVD collection to a colleague may not make sense, and that isn't much better than posting public links, qwerta has a point when it comes to the potential for someone unethical to abuse the system.

I appreciate the challenges Dropbox faces with respect to copyright, and that it is easier to focus on making a viable business if a broad policy wastes less of their time on the issue. However, it's also a complicated when you've given a service read/write access to your hard drive—not necessarily because its reasonable to assume that Dropbox would take a legal risk like proactively deleting content on your computer, but because it's almost an unreasonable amount of trust you're granting them in the first place.

Anyway, maybe you meant, "Not all of your arguments apply to shared files."

You could also just encrypt before uploading.

you could just flip a single bit before uploading

Or I could just use my own server... Way more comfortable

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