[liberationtech] Is Dropbox opening uploaded documents?

[Reed Black]

On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 2:14 AM, stef <s at ctrlc.hu> wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 07:58:17AM +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> > Dropbox is pulling a Skype.
>
> no it's not, it's generating thumbnails.


Dropbox generates thumbnails and optimized document views for smartphone
clients. This could happen on demand, or it could be batched after the
upload. Checking whether the embedded link is accessed a second time on
displaying a doc on a smartphone might be revealing.

It also wouldn't be surprising if they were working on some kind of content
indexing as other sync services are. Cloud storage is a competitive space,
and Dropbox needs to keep up in order to maintain their rather high price
per unit of storage.

Some Dropbox developers are visible in their forums if someone wants to ask
first-hand.

This level of scrutiny doesn't make sense for any service with a closed
source, self-updating client, however. Even if they encrypted client-side,
made every kind of promise and did everything else perfectly, they could be
compelled to quietly change things overnight. That could happen for
everybody, or for just a few users who get slipped a different version.
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