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The Dropbox Foundation

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Re: The Dropbox Foundation

#61

Post by book_mentioned »

tgb wrote: post #27
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.

What exactly are you referring to? My life is stored on Dropbox so I'd rather like to know.

37signals, not Dropbox: Trust is Fragile | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3470876 (2012)

>foreverbanned: They didn't mentioned the filename at first. What they actually said was: "And a Basecamp user uploaded the 100,000,000th file (It was a picture of a cat!)"

AFAIK there is no equivalent Dropbox incident, though they were forced to clarify their marketing in 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Dropbox#May_2011_...

Re: The Dropbox Foundation

#62

Post by srean »

montrose wrote: post #58

It is huge that they give unrestricted grants. I've been involved in the nonprofit world a lot in the last few years, and the most surprising thing I've learned is how depressingly common restricted grants are. Restricted grants are when you give money to a nonprofit to do what you want, rather than what they want. Usually this is some highly visible thing that the donor can then claim credit for. These projects are…

> Restricted grants are when you give money to a nonprofit to do what you want, rather than what they want.

Spot on.

The picture is often worse than the one you have painted -- Hey there, here's a few million dollars to help your country tackle AIDS. BTW, you can only spend it on drugs manufactured by US pharma.

At that stage its creative accounting to route tax money to your base of choice, with PR for free. Works the same for defense related grants.

Re: The Dropbox Foundation

#63

Post by staticelf »

> For the past 10 years, we’ve seen the impact our products can have when they free up our time to focus on work that truly matters. Medical researchers share data sets to develop vaccines. Musicians compose scores. Aid workers access and coordinate information from the field.

Is it just me that think this is very cringy and reminds me of https://youtu.be/J-GVd_HLlps?t=31s

I like that they help fund stuff but I just think the statement is kind of hilarious.

Re: The Dropbox Foundation

#64

Post by [deleted] »

mful wrote: post #54

> A big part of our mission has always been helping our users achieve their missions. Do these types of PR lines from companies that make productivity tools actually resonate with folks? At Dropbox’s scale, they probably materially increase economic productivity, which is great. Why push some narrative about helping aid workers achieve their mission? This sort of language seems especially strange to me when announcin…

[deleted]

Re: The Dropbox Foundation

#65

Post by TorKlingberg »

anubisresources wrote: post #44
tgb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly are you referring to? My life is stored on Dropbox so I'd rather like to know.

Dropbox doesn’t encrypt your data. There area bunch of other companies that do encrypted cloud storage, eg keybase

I want web access to my files in Dropbox, so E2E encryption is not an option. Ok, you could do decryption in the browser, but I wouldn't trust that.

Re: The Dropbox Foundation

#66

Post by matt4077 »

rocqua wrote: post #55
matt4077 wrote: post #5

So I guess they'll be sued any second now? Because people on the internet keep telling me companies can't just give away shareholders' money? /s

They aren't a public company. If they were, this might indeed cause some activist investors to take measures that might include lawsuits.

They obviously do have shareholders, though. And I doubt that they got explicit consent from every single employee that owns shares or options, and every single investor. I've also never seen the argument made with explicit reference to publicly traded corporations only.

They also filed for IPO in January. I doubt that they will shut down the Foundation a few months after announcing it when they go public.

Re: The Dropbox Foundation

#67

Post by Hasknewbie »

oblio wrote: post #21
bad_user wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That was in 1998, give it a break. I'm not saying that they're perfect now, but they're definitely better :)

It started in 1998. Related leaks continued until 2004 it seems.

Beside these, MS have been dragged to court multiple times for unethical business practices, on both side of the Atlantic, and were found guilty, again on both sides (so it's not merely "an EU witch hunt"). The last time that I know of was in 2016 for the "malware-like forced installation of Windows 10" case. Windows 10, supposedly their latest and best, being itself technically a spyware. They're an immoral company. "Definitely better", I think not.

Re: The Dropbox Foundation

#68

Post by matt4077 »

montrose wrote: post #60
ktpsns wrote: post #31

A foundation with 20M$ and these ambitious goals is a gift for the society. However, it is also the typical American way of company-society interaction. The actually intended way is called "paxing taxes". Dropbox, like a good part of the US tech companies, has it's European site in Ireland, a country known for its low tax rates [1]. [1] https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/business-spectator...

It is a big mistake to think that merely paying taxes is a sufficient substitute for donations. Governments are like the biggest of big companies: they tend to be very conservative about what they'll fund. Individual donors and small foundations play a crucial role in funding the sort of risky outliers that new ideas come from.

Voluntary donations are important, which is why it's so sad to see them diminished in the US (the increase i the standard deduction makes donations taxable for 80%+ of the population).

Donations do have blind spots, though: They rarely go through the sort of assessment that is required for public spending. They are also susceptible to individuals' subjective motivations. I know of one charity caring for stray cats financed mostly by the estates of wealthy widows. Meanwhile, nobody donates to rehabilitation efforts of middle-aged sex offenders.

Re: The Dropbox Foundation

#69

Post by humanrebar »

ktpsns wrote: post #31

A foundation with 20M$ and these ambitious goals is a gift for the society. However, it is also the typical American way of company-society interaction. The actually intended way is called "paxing taxes". Dropbox, like a good part of the US tech companies, has it's European site in Ireland, a country known for its low tax rates [1]. [1] https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/business-spectator...

> The actually intended way...

Companies should pay taxes, and more, lobby officials for fair and simple tax codes so these issues don't arise in the first place. Dropbox, Apple, Google, etc. shouldn't have a competitive advantage over companies unwilling or unable to play these games.

That being said, funding and supporting non-profits and charitable work is fine. I don't know whose intentions are so important that we should discourage that kind of behavior.

Re: The Dropbox Foundation

#70

Post by mmjaa »

gpvos wrote: post #57
fiatjaf wrote: post #42

Wasn't Dropbox "a feature, not a product"?

That's what Steve Jobs said. He can be wrong.

Dropbox should've been a feature of the operating system, but it isn't, because OS vendors have convinced themselves there's nothing left to do since the Internet is just going to solve all the hard problems now.

Seriously, I rue the day someone decided not to build-in such features as Internet-wide file sharing into my operating system, giving me full control over my content - subjugating me, instead, to the whims of yet another un-trustable third party.

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