[liberationtech] Is Dropbox opening uploaded documents?

[Kyle Maxwell]

I also suspect they're doing some level of malware screening. If so,
it didn't work too well here - not that this is malware (the author of
the original service that created these docs is a personal friend) but
it has a lot of similar code / functionality.

On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 11:31 AM, Reed Black <reed at unsafeword.org> wrote:
> 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.
>



-- 
@kylemaxwell