Originally published at: Dropbox is sharing users' files with OpenAI, here's how to opt out | Boing Boing
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Yeah, I saw news about this the other day. Not seeing on my settings where the AI exists, but I definitely want that turned off. It should only be opt in, hopefully not something we all have to opt out of manually.
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I just can’t believe that someone is not being consistently candid in matters surrounding 'Open’AI. Truly a mystery.
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My company blocked the use of these file sharing sites for years. Very annoying, but it turns out our cyber guys were right.
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I don’t seem to have a “Third Party AI” tab in my settings … which means that I will just have to keep going back to Dropbox at intervals to see if they’ve added it, and disable it as soon as they do.
I have to say that “Get our secure professional file storage, oh, btw, we may share all your content with unspecified third parties” is a mixed message from the marketing point of view.
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okay so who has an online file storage/sync solution that doesn’t suck and doesn’t require me to run stuff myself? I’m technically capable of setting up my own containerized linux NAS or whatever; however I don’t WANT to because I don’t find that fun in any way.
(do not say iCloud, Sonoma blew it up on my mac and it’s dead to me now.)
I’m not seeing any AI options. I wonder if it’s because I’m in the EU, or if they’re just rolling this out in phases.
Well, I guess technically one could aquire a controlling interest in Amazon. Which would mean one sort of owns AWS. Boom, personal cloud storage and the techies to run it, done.
So… where’s the AI part of what Dropbox does? I’ve not used it enough to know what’s all under the hood… but you upload files, you download files… the AI plays what part in all this?
All this inches me closer to abandoning technology and building a shack deep into Crown land.
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Presumably they’re mining for their AI “training data“. Hopefully no chunks of the files turn up in other places. From the repeated word exploits, it seems that the source data isn’t rendered down to info purée.
It’s probably going to be sold as a ‘convenient’ or ‘fun’ way of finding and summarising information you’ve uploaded to Dropbox, which they think will make it more attractive to users, who spend money on premium plans.
In short - they’ve got fed up of the people who just want a quick, easy and reliable way to sync files and have embraced [thank you Cory] enshittification of what was once a good service. But then, why am I surprised? This is the company that thought adding Condoleeza Rice to the board was a good idea.
I’m sure my published erotic fanfiction is already in all the training data so they may as well have my works in progress too. 
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I’ve been a user of Tresorit for a while now. It’s built around end-to-end encryption. It’s not free, but it has been reliable for me.
It’s not in Canada either, apparently (data point of 1, aka anecdote from me). When I get to the US I’ll have to check for it.
Same with mine, tbh. Though, I’m less upset about it since if we get real technical about fanfic, I didn’t exactly ask permission of the rightsholder either.
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The horse already bolted
I don’t think that it’s a fair case that a cloud storage provider that people use to protect their medical and financial information should just experience a hand-wave for potentially selling peoples’ data to a 3rd-party miner. Using a flimsy opt-out? The absolute minimum here is opt-in.
This ain’t a social media company tracking your interactions.
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Data scraping is the great leveller I guess!
I have a paid 2TB account, it’s just called Plus, I do not have the AI tab in my settings.
A Dropbox forum question about where the tab is was answered this way.
This is currently available to Dropbox Professional, Essentials, Business, Business Plus, and some customers on Dropbox Standard and Advanced plans at the moment and not on the Basic plan.
They have so many dang plans it hard to tell what’s what.
I’m paying 120 bucks a year, the business plans are way more money.
So maybe this doesn’t affect plain old regular people accounts.
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