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Process Monitor[1] will show you every filesystem call Dropbox is making. (Like strace.) That should confirm or refute this article's claims.

(You could also just collect an ETW trace and analyze it in xperf (err, WPA, of course) yourself.)

[1] https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb896645.aspx

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I copied a file in C:\ and saw Dropbox access it a few moments later, followed by network activity:

http://cl.ly/image/443Y1S092g1R

Uhm no. It calls QueryBasicInformation and closes it again right after.

Do you think QueryBasicInformation is a mischaracterization of the word "access"?

QueryBasicInformation is like a subset of stat(2). It can't access a file's contents. While I'd prefer Dropbox not to go looking at file metadata on my whole device, I'd chalk this one up to over-eager coding and not some kind of data-smuggling backdoor.

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