Response from dropbox in that post: "Jumping in to clarify some confusion. The AI third-party toggle is only visible to users who have access to our AI features. If you don’t see the AI third-party toggle, then you can’t view or use Dropbox AI features. To reiterate, neither this nor any other setting automatically or passively sends any Dropbox customer data to a third-party AI service. Please see our Help Center article for a list of those with access to Dropbox AI features."
I tried to use them recently and their service had some problems.
They have an option to "stream" files when you need them. The only problem is you need an internet connection to access them. I did not trust this kind of system and I actually need to access my files even without internet.
So there is a way to make the files available offline. Great! Problem solves. NOPE! They offer an option to have your files available offline, but they might remove the files and make them only available in the cloud if you local storage gets low.
That is really all they say about it and there is no option to turn this off. I was uncomfortable about their vagueness and my inability to disable this.
Within 24 hours of paying for their service I learned of this and they refused to refund my purchase.
If your business is using Dropbox as cloud storage, you are so fucked!
In 2015, I worked in a company that stored financial records. Small restaurant company with 80 employees. I emailed them last week about this and they're already making moves to leave.
Time for dropbox users to upload all kinds of crap for ai to "learn" from, all within tos of course.
I bet there are many kinds of ways to make your files poison the ai learning data. Its going to be fun for those ai guys to sort which files are probably safe and which are not. I think even if ONE user manages to slip something that corrupts the training data and its not noticed soon enough it might cause problems for them. Though someone who actually knows something about the subject might want to tell if i'm talking shit or not.
I'm not against ai in general, but if its trained with data that was obtained from unwilling people, like this, then its makers can fuck off.
If someone has a way to poison their AI training by adding junk along my regular files I'm interested. Sadly I use it at work and I cannot decide to migrate to another cloud so I better sabotage them
Happy I moved to Syncthing a long time ago. My data is replicated on several locations and instances on cheap old raspberries+drives and syncs instantly even on my phone, where I keep Obsidian notes. No size limits, no huge hassle, 10 minutes to get a new instance set up.
Every now and then I will rsync the encrypted version to an offline drive and store it somewhere else.
If you aren't aware rclone makes it easy to backup (copy) or sync files to different cloud providers like Dropbox and you can setup encryption very easily so you can continue using Dropbox since it does have pretty good value for the price even though they've shown they aren't trustworthy.
That's actually fucked up. To spring that "feature" out of no where and then make it not optional, is a very bad move. I know some corporate clients in the medical industry that have used Dropbox for company docs and I imagine that will be going away soon.