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Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

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Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#5
post #4

"collect it all" But I wonder why we don't have application isolation as a basic design principle. Imagine an OS where applications/serices each get their own mini-filesystem, without ability to access each other's data. Would that work?

I'm pretty sure that's called Android. Or ChromeOS. Or iOS. Of course, then we just give all those permissions back to any apps that ask for them.

Edit: And the modern sandbox modes in Windows and OSX.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#6
post #4

"collect it all" But I wonder why we don't have application isolation as a basic design principle. Imagine an OS where applications/serices each get their own mini-filesystem, without ability to access each other's data. Would that work?

Imagin an OS where applications/serices each get their own mini-filesystem, without ability to access each other's data.

OS X does this for sandboxed apps:

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Securi...

All apps from the App Store are sandboxed.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#7
post #4

"collect it all" But I wonder why we don't have application isolation as a basic design principle. Imagine an OS where applications/serices each get their own mini-filesystem, without ability to access each other's data. Would that work?

That's the basic idea behind sandboxing, and it's a model that a lot of newer OSes are moving towards, especially in mobile.

Android does this for all apps, as does iOS. MacOS is also doing it for apps downloaded from the App Store.

On the server side, that's also one of the things that Docker gives you.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#8
If taken at face value, this implies that Dropbox is spending their own bandwidth and storage space for data that's potentially much bigger than your actual shared folder, without charging you for it.

What's actually going on here? What sort of false positives might we expect from such a program?

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#9
post #4

"collect it all" But I wonder why we don't have application isolation as a basic design principle. Imagine an OS where applications/serices each get their own mini-filesystem, without ability to access each other's data. Would that work?

Windows 8/8.1/10 do this with Modern Apps.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#10
I don't see any evidence that Dropbox actually transfers files, and I'd be very surprised if that would actually happen.

But if the information is correct, it does transfer some kind of information to the Dropbox servers directly after accessing files outside the sync folder. I would have liked an examination of the tranferred data, or at least a comparison of the amount of data transferred compared to the size of the accessed file.

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