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A Dropbox employee looking through your files for filenames with DVDRIP would be actively looking. Hashing a file and comparing it to a blacklist is automated scanning. I think a blacklist is a perfectly reasonable solution to this problem and is as minimally invasive as possible. How would you approach this problem differently?

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Snooping doesn't become not-snooping when software does it instead of a human. Ask the NSA.

How would I deal with it? To me it's clearly none of Dropbox's business and they shouldn't be doing this in any way, shape, or form.

"it's clearly none of Dropbox's business"

Actually, it's a core piece of Dropbox's business. One of the ways they save on storage is by comparing hashes of files (or even parts of files - how many bits of any two JPG or DOC files are identical?) being stored and, if identical, only store one copy of the file. That and they explain in plain english that they're allowed to do that. That they explicitly say they do as much in their TOS puts the onus on the user to not store anything they're concerned about the privacy of on Dropbox's servers.

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