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by GeekyBear
2897 days ago
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I used Dropbox in the early days because of the ability to place a file in your public folder and allow others to download a copy of that file using a standard URL. You could share a file with your colleagues by simply emailing a URL to the file. No other service was as straightforward at the time. When that feature was later removed, I stopped using Dropbox. |
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Such a feature was a pretty bad phishing and social engineering vector, particularly when you could render html out of that folder, but even when html was dropped that there were social engineering attacks a bad actor could pull relying on the user's trust of a dropbox url. You could also guess other files in the public folder based on the url, which was a privacy concern.
Multiple years before support was dropped, shared links were added, which fix these concerns. You can set ?dl=1 to get a raw link. `curl/wget` (set to follow redirects) still get you the raw contents even if you don't set ?dl=1.