| The risk factors fail to mention their inability to offer any kind of end-to-end encryption. Or that E2E encryption is the differentiator that most of their competitors offer. Dropbox (employees and trusted third parties) will always have access to your files. Before you downvote. This is not necessarily a bad thing. They can deliver more features and better performance as a result. Reliability is key, and it's certainly easier to understand what users need, and to develop, implement and debug new features, when you've got access to the files users are storing. But eventually, end-to-end encryption will take hold. It took decades for HTTPS to become the defacto standard, but it did. Email is moving that direction (Proton Mail, Tutanota). Text messaging is moving that direction (Signal, WhatsApp?). And there's a number of Dropbox competitors that are growing fast because of better privacy and E2E encryption (SpiderOak, Tresorit, Sync.com, pCloud). NextCloud (open source self-hosted Dropbox alternative) also just launched end-to-end encryption. These companies have been slowly solving the problems that Drew claimed were impossible when Edward Snowden dropped the bomb. Meanwhile Dropbox has been pouring dollars into marketing and a Microsoft Office / OneNote / Google Docs competitor (Paper). Drew's response to end-to-end encryption:
https://techcrunch.com/2014/11/04/dropboxs-drew-houston-resp... Dropbox risk factors (many unsolvable):
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1467623/000119312518... I use Dropbox and feel the product is still the leader in terms of features, but I see the competition catching up, with better privacy (end-to-end encryption) built in. |
No it doesn't.
I've never heard of Tutanota, but Proton Mail is hardly evidence of anything. In fact the attack vector for email is very different when compared with other channels, as for email I'm not afraid of my email provider as I'm afraid of hacking attempts. Yes, I value security over privacy for email. Therefore I would trust Gmail more than I would trust Proton Mail.
Proton Email is also non-standard and is obviously not E2E encrypted when it comes to communicating with non-Proton recipients. If I actually wanted encrypted email, I would use GPG. It sucks from a usability point of view, but it's standard and for email that matters.
> I use Dropbox and it's still the leader in terms of features, but I see the competition catching up, with better privacy (end-to-end encryption) built in.
Curious, which competition?
I tried everything that I could find, because Dropbox has a high price and their online search didn't work well even after I upgraded to Pro.
Btw, it might actually be better to do an encrypted drive with https://cryptomator.org on top of Dropbox or Google Drive. It's definitely more reliable ;-)
Or in other words, if the service provider does not get access to your files due to encryption, then there isn't much value they can add. You can't have a secure web interface for encrypted files, you can't have online search. So might as well do application-level encryption and all you need is cheap and reliable storage.