Dropbox spooks users with new AI features that send data to OpenAI when used
Dropbox spooks users by sending data to OpenAI for AI search features
Edited the title to what the article has now.
... enabled-by-default...
... shares your Dropbox data with OpenAI ...
... an experimental AI-powered search feature. ...
... user data [IS] shared with third-party AI partners...
This would be more than enough reason for me to cancel and delete my account if I were still a customer.
If you can't trust a company with your data, then you can't trust the company at all.
Why do companies have to be so opaque with things? If they really wanted users to try some experimental, data-sharing feature, offer it to them as an opt-in beta feature and pay them for being a guinea pig.
Consent with compensation is way better than non-consent with zero transparency.
This should be justification enough for any enterprise company using Dropbox to dump them overboard
Fuck. I have been using them for backup for years, I currently have everything on my NAS but still like having important stuff in an offsite backup.
Anyone know a reasonably priced cloud storage provider that has integration (either 3rd or 1st party) with Unraid?
Edit: Dropbox just renewed my annual subscription last night at midnight 🙃
Double edit: I went into my Dropbox web portal and found that the setting was enabled by default for me. I'm in the US.
I use wasabi, it's an Amazon s3 compatible storage solution, $5/month/TB with no network or access fees
Oh that's not bad! Thanks I'll look into it. What are you using to send the backups to Wasabi?
I run my NAS on TrueNAS, and it just has a built-in solution for taking ZFS snapshots, encrypting them, and shipping them to an S3-compatible storage.
However, for unraid, I think your easiest thing will be to use the rclone plugin
I use Unraid too. What app are you using for backup? Most allow for encrypted backups which renders this issue moot (though still shitty).
I use Duplicacy (not to be confused with the unreliable Duplicati) and send encrypted backups to B2 Backblaze.
I'm actually not backing up my NAS at the moment. It's been on my to do list for a while to figure out a solution.
How much does Backblaze run you per month? I've got ~2tb stored currently.
$6/TB/month
I had good luck with B2 backblaze but recently switched to storj for E2EE backups without having encrypted filenames in the browser. Overall these solutions are slower and more expensive than typical cloud backups, but it's well worth it to stick it to the man.
Edit: more expensive, not cheaper.
Cool I will look into that! What are you running on your NAS to facilitate the backups?
TrueNAS Scale has a built-in cloud backup tool that supports the common sites and protocols. Most all NAS solutions have something similar. It's really just an rsync wrapper with authentication and storage protocol support.
Did you read the article before freaking out?
There's a lot of missing context with those ellipsis. Enabled by default means you're just going to see the feature but it's not doing anything or sending any data until you interact with it. Even when you do it prompts you first to explain what it's going to do. If you don't want to see the feature at all you can just toggle it back off but no data has moved until you've consented to it.
Yes, a fair point that was mentioned in the article.
I may be speaking only for myself, but I don't want any new features enabled by default. Subsequent popups and warnings may be hastily ignored/skipped during a user's busy day, so it's too easy to accidentally give consent, and consent shouldn't be accidental.
Let users know about the feature in a newsletter or "what's new" section of the site, and let the user opt-in to try this new feature (if they wish). That's really the only ethical, transparent, and 100% way to ensure consent.
They made some seriously bad choices in the past few years that I honestly don't believe they can survive by 2030. Just like photobucket and vimeo, Dropbox has reached peak shit.
I already moved anything sensitive out of my pro account, switched to free, and now use it to store memes and porn since that realization.
