[chinathrow]

"This is, by necessity, a system-wide process."

This is, by design, a fucking huge defect of the underlying system calls.

Give the OS a list of folders to watch. Dropbox should not even get a callback for a file it's not is supposed to watch.

[kevingadd]

You can constrain filesystem callbacks on Windows, I have no idea why Dropbox doesn't.

[raverbashing]

See: inotify in Linux

[krakensden]

inotify is by far the best of the filesystem notification APIs. It's wildly reasonable.

[r00fus]

Exactly - how much information can be inferred from the file and path alone - in a lot of my cases (for very personal files), quite a lot.

If Dropbox gets to interpose itself in every file update systemwide, that sounds like it's getting too much of my information. Encrypted/Stego drives don't matter - once you open it up to the system, Dropbox sees when you touch it.

All I can gather from this discussion is that I'm glad I'm not using Windows and Dropbox together.