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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?

#51

Post by smackay »

mappu wrote: post #40
zzleeper wrote: post #31

Independently of whether DB reads/uploads all the files or not, I've arrived at a difficult position about Dropbox: I'm looking for alternatives. No, it's unrelated with politics or pricing; it's just that in many cases Dropbox sucks . Why? Well, I mostly don't care about all the new features (mobile, Carousel, etc.). What I care the most is that i) it syncs files and ii) acts as a quasi-backup. However, I see the sa…

GPL Unison? Add in encfs with a cheap storage VPS for off-site redundancy. It should run on android too if you have a normal-looking chroot installed.

Unison was the first thing I tried after moving away from DropBox. The main problem I had with it was that both machines involved in the syncing had to be running which made moving from laptop to desktop not as seamless as I would have liked. Still the syncing process was flawless. I had better results using Seafile, http://seafile.com/en/home/, their free account was sufficient for my needs and worked great. You can self-host if you are worried about keeping control of your files.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#52

Post by cremno »

onderkalaci wrote: post #41
bobofettfett wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe not. Your speculation is as good as mine. Or the op. Or everyone else. The point was Dropbox is accessing files outside the folder, something I would not want or expect. "It is incredibly hard for me to believe that Dropbox has sneakily transferred >1TB" Did they transfer hashes? name+type+size for fingerprinting? Searching for credit numbers or SSNs? Who knows. I don't. And don't do evil is no longer the ba…

I agree with you. The main problem is that why dropbox accesses the files that it is not permitted.

I don't know. I'm actually more interested in what it receives/sends.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#53

Post by zzleeper »

mappu wrote: post #40
zzleeper wrote: post #31

Independently of whether DB reads/uploads all the files or not, I've arrived at a difficult position about Dropbox: I'm looking for alternatives. No, it's unrelated with politics or pricing; it's just that in many cases Dropbox sucks . Why? Well, I mostly don't care about all the new features (mobile, Carousel, etc.). What I care the most is that i) it syncs files and ii) acts as a quasi-backup. However, I see the sa…

GPL Unison? Add in encfs with a cheap storage VPS for off-site redundancy. It should run on android too if you have a normal-looking chroot installed.

Nice! I hadn't heard of Unison.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#54

Post by eps »

This might be shallow, inaccurate and sensationlist in tone, but it is inherently alarming.

Getting a list of files from the good old /Torrents directory that everyone has, but pretends they dont can be incriminating enough to raise some very serious privacy issues. They can explain this any way they want, but Dropbox certainly has no business accessing any files outside of its config and its sync folders.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#55

Post by pudquick »

flipp3r wrote: post #46

I'm not a Dropbox user, but why doesn't anyone with Dropbox just install a local proxy and try to read out the requests made to the Dropbox servers. The speculations on spying, etc. in this thread are completely worthles, just look at what they're sending to the servers.

FYI - they do certificate pinning for their clients and won't let you proxy the HTTPS connections, last I checked.

I'm not saying this as cause for alarm. Obviously if they were sending the files you could measure the volume of traffic if nothing else.

Make a completely random non-compressible file that's of an arbitrarily significant size (say 1M+) and see if that amount of traffic goes out to them.

I do think Dropbox is watching for filesystem events outside of the locations users specify, but I see zero evidence they're uploading information about the files / the files themselves so far.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#56

Post by gnud »

I just had a quick look at dropbox with ProcMon, and I learned that

  1) when I created a new text file on my desktop, it was not read by Dropbox
  2) when I created a new text file in my dropbox folder, it was immideately read by Dropbox
  3) I have to find some sync tool that doesn't feel the need to enumerate my network interfaces 3 times every second, when nothing is actually changing.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#57

Post by pjmlp »

java-man wrote: post #23
tjohns wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, if someone finds a vulnerability in Docker software and roots a process, your filesystem is safe? The idea is not sandboxing, it's "multiverse". Each process, even an OS one, gets its own little filesystem, and connects to a limited set of interfaces explicitly permitted by the user (and that can be audited by the user).

Yes, because you cannot even access the filesytem directly.

Applications only get the data handle for specific files, after being authorized to do so.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#58

Post by beaugunderson »

quotemstr wrote: post #14

Process Monitor[1] will show you every filesystem call Dropbox is making. (Like strace.) That should confirm or refute this article's claims. (You could also just collect an ETW trace and analyze it in xperf (err, WPA, of course) yourself.) [1] https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb896645.aspx

I copied a file in C:\ and saw Dropbox access it a few moments later, followed by network activity:

http://cl.ly/image/443Y1S092g1R

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#59

Post by aram »

pearjuice wrote: post #17

In a while, this will be disregarded as a bug, might be fixed and maybe Dropbox will even state that they apology and will be deleting all mistakenly uploaded files from their server(s). But you don't know. The lesson to be learned here is that proprietary software cannot be trusted. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html

I'm curious - why is this downvoted?

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#60

Post by gnud »

gnud wrote: post #56

I just had a quick look at dropbox with ProcMon, and I learned that 1) when I created a new text file on my desktop, it was not read by Dropbox 2) when I created a new text file in my dropbox folder, it was immideately read by Dropbox 3) I have to find some sync tool that doesn't feel the need to enumerate my network interfaces 3 times every second, when nothing is actually changing.

Just some more information: Dropbox does not read the file outside the dropbox folder. It does, however, 'QueryBasicFileInformation' and and 'QueryDirectory' when I create a file on my desktop.

I'm guessing this has to do with the explorer extension.

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