In the above screenshot, I could interact freely with other apps on the menu bar apart from the Backup & Sync app. Check out the screenshot below: Backup & Sync froze on the menu bar. Not only that, but the app also kept freezing as well. To bring it back up, I had to open it at least 3–4 times before it finally started syncing again.īefore you say that it might be an issue on my laptop, I have seen this exact behaviour on three different MacBooks with different OS versions. The app randomly quit and never restarted on its own. Now, what are these features that made me willing to sacrifice privacy? An amazing syncing mechanismīefore I moved to Dropbox, I was on the cloud storage platform that most people are on right now - Google Drive.Īpart from growing privacy issues with Google, the Backup & Sync macOS app for Google Drive is probably the worst cloud sync app that I’ve ever used. That was the most crucial factor in my decision to go with Dropbox. The grey area, if you would like to call it. However, I’m more of a balanced guy - I’m satisfied with the right mix of privacy and useful product features. There might be smaller regular privacy violations that go on within the company without surfacing to the public.įor hardcore privacy advocates, this will probably be the “goodbye forever” point with Dropbox. This incident is only an issue which caught the public eye.

When you’re paying $9.99 every month for a service, you would want the service provider to respect your privacy. However, that still doesn’t justify Dropbox’s action. In Dropbox’s defence, the data shared were anonymised before they reached Northwestern University.

Here’s an article by WIRED, reporting the issue: WIRED reported that Dropbox shared user information with researchers. If you search the web for privacy-friendly cloud storage services, Dropbox won’t make the list.Įven if it did by some miracle or probably biased reviews, it shouldn’t be anywhere in the top five.Īround 2017-18, Dropbox shared folder-level information of 400,000 users with researchers at Northwestern University. Let’s start with: Dropbox’s privacy practices In this post, I’ll talk about why I chose Dropbox even though they don’t have a stellar reputation when it comes to privacy. Wanting to move away from Google both because of privacy issues, and horrible apps, I was looking for suitable cloud storage provider alternatives.Īfter trying out all the major players in the cloud storage field, I decided to cast my vote for Dropbox.

Dropbox smart sync not showing up