So the Dropbox thing is still going. I figured it would've blown over by now but every time I check Twitter theres another wave of people posting screenshots of themselves deleting their accounts, hashtag DropDropbox and everything. For anyone who missed it: a couple weeks back Dropbox announced Condoleezza Rice was joining their board of directors, and a pretty large chunk of the internet was not happy about it. Her name is basically synonymous with the Iraq War and the surveillance state stuff that came out of the Bush years, and given that this is a company literally asking millions of people to trust it with their private files, less than a year after Snowden, the timing felt like a joke someone was playing on the PR department.
Drew Houston put out a statement saying Dropbox has "never done a national security request" and that privacy is core to the product, which, fine, maybe true, but it doesnt really answer why you'd pick her specifically. Theres a longer list of reasons people are annoyed and I wont rehash the whole thing, but it landed about three weeks after the Brendan Eich situation at Mozilla, so theres definitely a mood right now where people are actually looking at who sits on the boards of the software they use every day. I dont think that mood existed even a year ago. Nobody cared who was on Evernote's board in 2012.
Anyway. Ive had a Dropbox account since sometime in 2011, back when you'd get extra storage for every friend you referred and I spent an embarrassing amount of effort getting mine up past 15GB through referral spam. Its baked into basically everything I do, every writing project, every photo backup, the folder my whole freelance invoicing system lives in. Switching is annoying in a way thats hard to explain unless youve actually tried to migrate a few years of nested folders somewhere else. Symlinks break. Selective sync gets weird. Its a whole afternoon, minimum.
I spent part of Sunday actually poking at SpiderOak instead of just complaining about Dropbox on Twitter like a normal person. Its slower and the client feels like it was designed by engineers who have never once talked to a designer, but the pitch is that they cant read your files even if they wanted to, zero-knowledge encryption, the whole thing happens on your machine before it ever leaves. Dropbox cant say that. I dont think Ill actually move everything over this week, but Im going to start putting anything remotely sensitive there instead, tax stuff, client contracts, that kind of thing.
Its also just been a rough month generally for feeling okay about any of this. Heartbleed was barely three weeks ago and Im still getting emails from services telling me to reset passwords I forgot I even had. Then last Thursday Microsoft pushed out an emergency patch for a zero-day in Internet Explorer, versions 6 through 11, that was already being actively exploited, and they patched it even on Windows XP, despite XP officially going out of support less than a month earlier. Which I guess is nice of them, but its also a little unsettling that the bug was serious enough that they broke their own retirement plan for it within weeks.
None of this is really Dropbox's fault specifically, the Rice thing is a separate issue from the security stuff, but they sort of pile up into the same general feeling. Every couple weeks theres a new reason to sit there and think about how much of your life is sitting on somebody else's server, controlled by decisions you have zero input into, and mostly you just shrug and keep using the thing because switching is a pain and youve got actual work to do.
I did cancel the automatic photo backup on my phone though. Small thing, but it felt like something.
What Im actually curious about is whether any of this changes anything for Dropbox long term or if in six months everyone will have forgotten and gone right back to dragging files into that little folder icon without thinking twice. My money's on the second one, honestly. These things almost always fade. Doesnt mean Im wrong to be annoyed about it right now though.