[tuyguntn]

Today. We have indexed all of your documents, you can search easily inside your documents, even though you have created good directory structure and named your files accordingly.

Tomorrow. Hmm we have your data, lots of data, we wanted to know what is interesting to our users, so we decided to analyse them and find people with common interest.

Day after tomorrow. Miss Rice challenged us "can you find terrorist users using all of the documents you have indexed and analysed?"

Future. Hey user your first name is strange, your documents contain some strange characters, you are uploading data from country where our political leaders have problems, are you terrorist?

[akerl_]

You are of course welcome to not put your content on Dropbox, a private service run by a for-profit company.

They're adding a feature that they think the majority of their users will find useful, and betting that most of their users realize this doesn't increase Dropbox's access to their content: they could have written this indexing years ago and never disclosed it, using it solely for whatever tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory style acts they'd like.

If they lose the bet, they either pull the feature or go out of business. I'm betting their side, though, given that I expect most Dropbox users either don't care (which is their right) or care and made a willful decision to store their data on somebody else's systems (which is also their right).

[em3rgent0rdr]

Part of the concern is your average joe who doesn't read the ToS or understand computers might assume that their private Dropbox.com folder is exactly a computer analogue of a physical private folder where you drop your physical files from your physical desk, which then does some computer magic to sync them between your work and home desk.