Technology

Why does dropbox have the ability to see your files at all? That seems like a pretty bad security flaw in the first place.

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."

You can still opt out by opting not to use Dropbox.

Guess I need to find and close that account now

I HATE Dropbox.

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.

PLEASE NEVER WORK WITH DROPBOX

Closing my Dropbox account now.

I said this in another post:

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.

Wait, Dropbox can use your files to train AI? How is this acceptable? Aren't people storing their keepass vaults there?

Literally the first sentence of your own source:

Dropbox has hidden third party AI settings, not disabled them

Now I feel tempted to make a Dropbox account and fill it with gigabytes of noise data...

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

Thanks I forgot I even had a dropbox account. And everything is deleted files and account.

Best time for people to learn about home servers.

This situation is so ridiculous

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.

So are there any files that an AI shouldn't vacuum up that I just happen to have in my dropbox?

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.

https://rclone.org/dropbox/ https://rclone.org/crypt/ https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_copy/ https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_sync/

So if I don’t opt out can I force the AI to train on my files?

I have my dick pics in there wtf is AI going to learn