[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.