| It's biased to say that torrents and rapidshare are equivalent to illegal file sharing. Illegal file sharing is just how people use these platforms, but not these platforms themselves. Dropbox is just another file sharing platform which directly exposes to the threat of illegal file sharing. The de-duplication feature greatly helps pirates to gain access to files that don't belong to them, or even other people's privacy. If illegal file sharing service is something against your wishes, what you can do is to concentrate your effort to fight against copyright infringement (if you'd like to), instead of killing an innocent open source project that simply helps cross-account file sharing. I used to love Dropbox's de-duplication feature, and I think that helps a lot of people with low bandwidth connections. Since I started noticing the existence of such feature, I'm already aware of: 1. My files are no longer mine. Anyone who knows the hash can access my files immediately. 2. Dropbox's claims about encryption are totally pointless in this case. Encryption is not going to help. 3. Requests from government agencies are going to be fulfilled very promptly. 4. Even hackers can access my files with the knowledge of only the hash, why can't employees of Dropbox? I don't understand the "strict access policy" on employees inside Dropbox. Are there any difference between Dropbox's de-duplication and eDonkey's hash-to-file P2P? To me, Dropbox is doing something here that against their wishes. |
De-duplication requires commonality between files, which could not be found in encrypted data if users had unique keys.
Thus, if they have the ability to de-dupe _after_ you've uploaded a copy, they have the ability to decrypt your entire archive.
I'm not saying that's how they do it, but it would seem the logic is that your data never was particularly well encrypted.