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Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

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Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#201
post #186

That's why I bought a NAS and now have a 3-2-1 backup solution.

What do you use for keeping files synced between different machines like Dropbox/OneDrive/GDrive does?

I often mount filesystems with samba or iscsi, no syncing necessary.

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#202

Reminds me of an incident we had with Dropbox a decade ago. They deleted some niche accounting software (custom developed by us) from our Dropbox account, plus their own log files covering those deletions. Then played ignorant. We learned the lesson, and never again trusted Dropbox, for anything. (Best guess - a would-be client got pissed when software which they'd never paid for lacked a feature, and told Dropbox a…

> plus their own log files covering those deletions This is the really unreasonable part. Some convoluted internal process that ends up accidentally flagging a file as suspicious and then deleting it is bad enough, but still partially understandable if you're very conservative with assigning blame. But deleting the log files? Either extreme technical incompetence or plain malice.

Our assumption: Log files of everything still existed, but were flagged "Hide & Never Admit To, per $SecretReason".

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#203
post #24

If he uses it for work, and clearly, most shared links he creates are of copyrighted media content, how would this work in practice? Does Google Drive/Dropbox have some flag for "creator" accounts?

I don't have an answer for your question but from experience I can say that anecdotally most well known creators have their own infrastructure or outsourced infrastructure and legal teams. Content will not be deleted unless there are repeated egregious violations and complete refusal to remediate violations of the contract that their legal team agreed to. By contact I do not mean some thing that someone clickity-clic…

Rick and Morty isn't the only thing Justin works on. Likely this was his personal account and not something used specifically for that show. There's no mention of the show in his tweet.

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming this is copyright related... probably not. The only way this could be done in practice would be for Justin Roiland/Williams Street/Rick & Morty LLC/Cartoon Network/Warner Bros. to legally indemnify Dropbox - as in, agree to pay all of Dropbox's legal fees and damages if they get sued for copyright infringement outside of their DMCA 512 safe harbor. This is entirely impractical for an individual to pull off,…

bet you a dollar that they were taken down because they were sharing links to content they had created for Rick and Morty etc and Dropbox’s dumb algo just didn’t know that they were the creators of that content.

If that's the case surely they could have told him that was the reason. Otherwise we're talking about software engineers deliberately writing code to waste other people's time and make the Dropbox product look worse to their customers or prospective customers.

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#205

Dropbox doesn't have any functioning contact points. I cancelled my yearly subscription a month ago the day after it renewed, they cancelled my premium benefits immediately but never send the $120 refund that the cancellation page said I'd get. Tried contacting them from their website contact page, nothing. Tried tweeting at their support account, nothing. I'm half tempted to try to get my bank to do a chargeback. It…

I've gotten much quicker with chargebacks in this situation. Companies that go out of their way to insulate themselves from their customers leave you little other alternative.

Dropbox is acting no different than any other scammer here, and there's a limit to how much time I'm going to waste on being polite. Somehow it is always a "mistake", and somehow those "mistakes" always involve money flows in the same direction.

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#206

This is an inevitable consequence from the push to make cloud companies responsible for the content they host. Analyzing all of it can only be automated; automation will deliver weird false positives.

But do they have to delete the flagged account directly?

Also, can't they distinguish a spam account from a legit account based on the account history? I can't see why this is a difficult problem to solve.

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Quoted post unavailable.

>Of course I pointed and laughed at you, you were (and still are) acting very poorly towards others.

A non-confrontational mention that a tone marker would have helped, which you turned into an attack somehow (?), then you took pedantry to a new level (not uncommon on HN, but lol), and then after other insults on the OPs intelligence you say that they are acting poorly? What a laugh.

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be amazed that folks even today misunderstand it to be a 'backup' instead of a sync service.

It is a backup. Any copy of your data is a backup. It just shouldn't be the only backup (obviously, like any backup.)

A copy of your data that can be easily modified (whether through bugs, malice, or even just you mistakenly deleting a file and Dropbox happily deleting it everywhere for you) is not a backup. It’s definitely way better than nothing, but people relying on Dropbox as the only “backup” will be in for nasty surprises occasionally.

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#209
post #4

Are people still using dropbox? I thought other integrated service such as google drive and onedrive would have drove dropbox to the grave

I've been using Dropbox for at least a decade and have no intention to jump ship (though summary execution of accounts does give me pause). The reason why I do so is...

* It works on absolutely everything. I have one foot in every major tech ecosystem and that immediately excludes anything platform-specific like iCloud. I also used to daily-drive Linux, which has no official OneDrive client, and the Google Drive client is notoriously bad on that platform.

* Mobile photo upload was extremely convenient when I first discovered it and it still works very well. If I need to take a picture of something I can use my phone and then grab the file on my desktop or laptop.

* The option to store everything locally still exists and is the default. If I get banned from Dropbox I will still have my entire Dropbox folder contents as they were present on my desktop's massive hard drive array. Backing up Google Drive in this way can be done, but only if you aren't using anything like Docs or Sheets, which can't be stored locally without a manual file export. Dropbox even tried to replicate this with Paper and I never touched it for exactly this reason.

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