Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Dropbox Foundation

dropbox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 134 posts

Re: The Dropbox Foundation

#11

Post by cjoy »

smackay wrote: post #2

Open Question: What's the consensus of opinion regarding Dropbox while they still have Condoleezza Rice on the Board of Directors? Personally, I want to love them. I think Drew has built up a decent company. However choosing Dr. Rice for the board, although she probably brings a lot to the table, was an unforgivable act. The creation of the foundation is laudable but feels a bit of a band-aid to solving their image p…

Dropbox provides great value and I dearly miss it, but I can not support a company that willingly hosts a person so closely connected to illegitemate war and crimes against humanity. I doubt this has significance for Dropbox. It is more a matter of personal moral hygiene.

Re: The Dropbox Foundation

#12

Post by estsauver »

This is really great to see unconditional grants! It would be really wonderful to see this catch on as a norm for aide.

It seems a lot of time the specific conditions that are attached to a grant are used as a way of trying to hedge against the PR risk for a foundation/nonprofit that a grant was used improperly. I don't think empirically it's that effective of a hedge against money being used poorly anyway, organizations that will squander money will squander money.

It's also super exciting to see that they're offering in-kind support from employees as well. We're working in rural Kenya where the internet can be really challenging and I know that we'd be incredibly excited to work with some of Dropboxes team on sync'ing problems. My impression has been that the reliability and seamlessness of sync'ing at Dropbox has been primarily driven by some absolutely world class distributed systems talent, and it'd be phenomenal for organizations to get access to those employees/teams.

Re: The Dropbox Foundation

#13

Post by pentae »

I suppose when you're not able to give an unwavering commitment to protecting your customers data, coming up with a completely unrelated corporate social responsibility plan like this makes sense.

Re: The Dropbox Foundation

#14

Post by acct1771 »

bad_user wrote: post #9
philliphaydon wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t trust her at all. I have more trust in Microsoft than her so I moved to OneDrive the moment it was announced she was joining Dropbox.

Moving to Microsoft due to Condoleezza Rice being hired by Dropbox makes absolutely no sense. I'm not a US citizen, so I don't know about Condoleezza Rice and personally I don't care that much. But I do care about: 1. the Halloween documents 2. their NSA partnership 3. them being happy about censoring content on China's whims, which allegedly is also affecting international users 4. Windows 10 being a privacy nightma…

Halloween documents?

Re: The Dropbox Foundation

#15

Post by bad_user »

acct1771 wrote: post #14
bad_user wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moving to Microsoft due to Condoleezza Rice being hired by Dropbox makes absolutely no sense. I'm not a US citizen, so I don't know about Condoleezza Rice and personally I don't care that much. But I do care about: 1. the Halloween documents 2. their NSA partnership 3. them being happy about censoring content on China's whims, which allegedly is also affecting international users 4. Windows 10 being a privacy nightma…

Halloween documents?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

Re: The Dropbox Foundation

#16

Post by godzillabrennus »

pentae wrote: post #13

I suppose when you're not able to give an unwavering commitment to protecting your customers data, coming up with a completely unrelated corporate social responsibility plan like this makes sense.

This. It's amazing how many big companies use Dropbox with how limited their commitment to protecting customer data has been.

Re: The Dropbox Foundation

#17

Post by wepple »

mateuszf wrote: post #7
probably_wrong wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's a consensus. I've stopped using Dropbox due to that choice, but their success tells me that this is not too problematic for most of their users. I think it's one of those things were the product is just too good for people to quit, even if they disagree with the business practices.

> I think it's one of those things were the product is just too good for people to quit, even if they disagree with the business practices. This or most users don't even know/care about the company / software. They just installed it to solve a problem and it works fine

This may be highly anecdotal, but I’m a Dropbox user, live in the US, read HN probably daily, and still don’t know much about Condoleeza Rice or why it would be good or bad having her on the board.

Very much installed it to solve a problem and it works fine

(But now I guess i have some reading to do)

Re: The Dropbox Foundation

#18

Post by LaGrange »

smackay wrote: post #2

Open Question: What's the consensus of opinion regarding Dropbox while they still have Condoleezza Rice on the Board of Directors? Personally, I want to love them. I think Drew has built up a decent company. However choosing Dr. Rice for the board, although she probably brings a lot to the table, was an unforgivable act. The creation of the foundation is laudable but feels a bit of a band-aid to solving their image p…

> Open Question: What's the consensus of opinion regarding Dropbox while they still have Condoleezza Rice on the Board of Directors?

There is no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism. While I don't think this is excuse to just not give a flying f at all whatsoever, it sets a general expectation — I'm not going to pick what's worse, Rice in the Board of Directors or an NSA partnership or a plan to essentially _become_ the NSA, but for advertising.

One day I'll stop being lazy and make something that's independent from cloud providers (and thus their ethical issues) for myself. It will probably be less power efficient and thus contribute more to global warming, but at least I'll have tried - but, still, there is no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism.

Re: The Dropbox Foundation

#19

Post by gurkendoktor »

shaki-dora wrote: post #8
philliphaydon wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t trust her at all. I have more trust in Microsoft than her so I moved to OneDrive the moment it was announced she was joining Dropbox.

I'm having trouble finding a single position of her that I agree with. I'm actually listening to Brahms now, to see if maybe her choice of favourite composer is at least sensible. But I do get the impression that she's the kind of person that one can have a deep discussion with even while disagreeing; that her positions, while wrong, are within the realm of possibilities, especially given her rather impressive biogra…

> In other words: she's frequently wrong, but she's not batshit crazy and filled with hate like the current administration.

Is it really better if an intelligent person willingly helps start the Iraq war than if an hateful person does so on a whim? I find it hard to decide what's scarier.

I've stopped using Dropbox when they hired her, but not because I think there are practical implications for users. Rather, I wish that the IT community would finally, please, start thinking about ethics.

Re: The Dropbox Foundation

#20

Post by JepZ »

> The Foundation will instead offer flexible, unrestricted grants that our partners can use to meet their greatest needs.

When you read that and have the recent Oxfam scandal in mind, it creates some interesting pictures.

Btw. I don't want to criticize the decision for unrestricted grants in any way, as I don't have enough expertise in the field.

Post reply on HN