[LINK] Dropbox ToS Under Fire

[Alex (Maxious) Sadleir]

On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 10:14 AM, eric scheid
<eric.scheid at ironclad.net.au> wrote:
> On 6/7/11 8:35 AM, "Roger Clarke" <Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au> wrote:
>
>> "You grant us (and those we work with to provide the services)
>> worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable rights to use,
>> copy, distribute, prepare derivative works (such as translations or
>> format conversions) of, perform, or publicly display that stuff to
>> the extent reasonably necessary for the service," the company's
>> revised terms and conditions stated.
>
>
> Uh yeah ... selective quoting by a journalist strikes again.
>
>
> >From the TOS: https://www.dropbox.com/terms
>
>    We sometimes need your permission to do what you ask us to do
>    with your stuff (for example, hosting, making public, or sharing
>    your files). By submitting your stuff to the Services, you grant
>    us (...) . This license is solely to enable us to technically
>    administer, display, and operate the Services. You must ensure you
>    have the rights you need to grant us that permission.
>
> That is, if you want to use DropBox to share a file, you need to give
> permission to DropBox to share that file.

This is just part of a campaign by Christopher Soghoian who has a
personal vendetta against Dropbox after his original complaints about
the security of the service were widely dismissed as scaremongering.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/dropbox-ftc/

Briefly his complaint was that Dropbox said they "encrypted the files"
stored on the service, he believed it was misleading or deceptive
conduct as the Dropbox servers have the private key rather than it
being stored on your local computers - which would ruin the easy
synchronization experience that is Dropbox's main feature. While the
liberal use of the term encryption in IT is a problem, Dropbox are
hardly the worst offenders compared to all the companies that have
since been found to have plaintext or trivially encrypted passwords.