>You don't know that Dropbox does.
They've certainly given me no reason to think they don't, and enough circumstantial evidence to believe they probably do. We know for a fact they are targeted by the NSA, because they were specifically mentioned in the PRISM documents as the probable next target for cooperation with that program. So they're on the NSA's radar, and everyone knows it, and they know everyone knows it. In spite of this, a few months later, they bring onto their board Condoleezza Rice, a woman who, while she was in the Bush administration, went to bat for their warrantless wiretapping program a dozen times. She hasn't recanted - she's still a huge fan.
This is pretty much the exact opposite of what you would do to address privacy concerns with your company.
And in the whole time, they've addressed none of this. They spam HN with their stupid blog posts, and when somebody brings up the privacy issues, the poster gets downvoted, and Dropbox goes silent until their next blog post about whatever wonderful technology they've developed to make it easier for the US government to snoop on your data. At the very least, they clearly aren't very concerned about their image with respect to customer privacy, and they don't care if you know it.
It's not like providing a service like Dropbox and providing provable security isn't a solved problem. And they don't do it. Yet they are the biggest player in this market. My, a clean site design and engineering blog really do go a long way.
Anyway, this isn't a court of law. I'm not a judge or a jury and I'm not in a position to put anyone in jail. Requiring that level of proof to decide not to do business with someone, or whether to associate with them professionally, is not reasonable. They have not been forthright about privacy issues over the past year, they have acted in a way that shows they don't regard the legitimate privacy concerns of their users at all, and they have put someone on their board who stands in direct opposition to all that, anyway. That's more than enough.
There was a lot of big talk last year around here about how people who work at the NSA ought to be ashamed, about how "the community" needs to ostracize these people. Soul searching about what kind of person you would have to be to create those kinds of systems, what delusions you would have to buy into, etc etc. Yet that's exactly what has happened at Dropbox - exactly those kinds of people are working there right now - and every week they post some bullshit from their blog and every week this board lines up to congratulate them. You're all a bunch of hypocrites.