It’s not first time an issue had been raised. They might have addressed these concerns, but the fact remains they went out of their way to ignore them in the first place. Just last year, Dropbox was outed for considering itself above the permission protocols of ordinary macOS software. Yet, its the mechanics that bother me most. From questionable characters joining the board, to the fact that the service has been seriously hacked. Unfortunately, every now and then something happens with Dropbox that reminds me of the sketchy feelings they give me. While syncing exclusively with iCloud certainly provides more convenience, In a sense I would just be moving security issues from one place to another. Their reliance on dropbox makes me consider carefully what work I am willing to store with them. If I could sync them any other way, I would. DEVONTHINK TO GO ICLOUD SYNC FREEAt this point I have whittled it down to the remains of my free storage allocation. I could choose not to use the remaining few that use Dropbox for syncing. 3 These apps are becoming more few and fair between, though. Despite the relative advances of iCloud in the past couple of years, apps like Scrivener, will only sync with Dropbox. As a heavy iOS user, I have apps and workflows that still rely on the service. It would be taking it too far to say I have no choice in the matter. Most questions I get in this area relate almost exclusively to Dropbox. Call this an amateur case study, as most of it applies much further afield The Problem with Dropbox It pays to not only understand this, but to set good habits for how you protect yourself, and your work. Colleges are always big targets for data hackers. Trusting your data to university servers is something students ought to be wary of. Graduate students should be particularly vigilant. Student’s working at all levels operate within the same networks, under the same conditions. This is not only a concern for tenured professors. Or even guarding oneself against the so-called academic dark arts. Never mind shameless threats to academic freedom, or protecting legitimate research of contentious issues. Many academics also have to deal with non-disclosure agreements, and data management is becoming a default aspect of funding applications. For one thing, data security is critical in human participant research, for ethical and legal reasons. Whether for protecting one’s own ideas, or keeping serious promises. Academic researchers have good reasons for needing encryption. But if you’re looking for a legitimate use case, look no further than academic users. It doesn’t take a genius to work out the vested interests at play. They come from the same trade-off argument. Spurious claims about encryption are nothing new, but they are popular political currency at the moment. Without security, privacy is inevitably compromised. Although not interchangeable, in this context they are inherently related. I might slip on occasion and use the word privacy. This post is really about personal data security. With this in mind, something I get asked about often is how secure is Dropbox? My answer often leads to the question, what are the best dropbox alternatives? One of the most ubiquitous trade-offs people make today involves cloud storage. That is only true by quirks of history and convenience, it doesn’t have to be that way. You also hear that usability and security are a trade-off. When privacy and security are not conflated, we are told that there is a need to trade one for the other. 1 I have a stake in these ideas for my own reasons, but I believe they should be a concern for everyone. I’m no expert, but I will advocate where I can. Take a look around this site and it won’t take long to recognise my preoccupation with security and privacy.
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