You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
Zero Knowledge Encryption
I find that many Cloud services offer encryption during transfer to the service and encryption at the destination. Dropbox does this too. Unfortunately, the keys used at the destination are available to Dropbox. What would make Dropbox unique is if it would offer Zero Knowledge encryption at the client. That way all files are encrypted at the client with the customer retaining the keys. Why is this important? There can be bugs during transfer even if encryption is used (remember the famous OOPS with caches on internet servers offering up unencrypted data?). Also, the government can force Dropbox to deliver user data (or it may be compromised by hackers).
Dropbox with Zero Knowledge Encryption would be a market leading solution that would drive a great preference over OneDrive, Google Drive and others. It would be the only way I would be comfortable putting my files on the cloud.
I wanted to share a quick update with you:
We have launched our end-to-end encryption in April. More details can be found here and here.
High level overview:
You can now add end-to-end encryption to team folders. The functionality is available for our Advanced, Business Plus and Enterprise customers at no additional costs.
If there are any questions, please let me know!
I just run through the rclone crypt layer before I mount my cloud providers.
I still think it's horrible, privacy is locked behind a paywall.It looks like Dropbox is bringing end-to-end encryption soon to business users but not to non-business users (article link below). Do you or anyone else know of good alternate solutions for end-to-end file system encryption?
https://www.techradar.com/news/dropbox-is-bringing-end-to-end-encryption-for-business-users
Cryptomator and Veracrypt. I'm using Cryptomator, but it's not free on Android and Apple device.
Anyway, I'm free Dropbox user right now, I don't have any plan to back to be paid customer anymore.
You can add me to the "Down vote" for not having this option. They bought out boxcryptor, which many of us used to add the extra layer of encryption, while still being able to use the history and version features within dropbox. I've been a paid subscriber for years, but without this feature, it's time to move on.
The number of votes is irrelevant. Companies like Dropbox do not implement features based on user suggestions. They do so via bean counting.
Dropbox has over 15 million users that pay a subscription fee and nearly $2 BILLION in revenue. That subscription payment is a "vote" for the policy of "whatever you do is fine by me."
They would need to lose around 1 million subscriptions explicitly due to lack of zero-knowledge encryption before they even considered implementing the idea.
Synopsis: If you are paying a fee now, you have already voted that everything is absolutely great and in no need of change.
"Status: Needs more votes" ???
I thought 166 votes is a LOT comparing to the number of people who are active in this section of the forum?
How many votes are required?
https://help.dropbox.com/accounts-billing/security/how-security-works
Dropbox doesn't provide for client-side encryption. Dropbox also doesn't support the creation of your own private keys. However, Dropbox users are free to add their own encryption.I'm using Cryptomator, so I lost a few features from Dropbox to gain my privacy. Dropbox Vault is just a folder with an extra password, not encrypted, just password / pin to access it.
I tried to create a secret.txt file, write something on it, "Copy Dropbox Link", and lock my vault, then, I tried to open this copied link to Private Browsing mode, and I can see what is inside secret.txt file without login to any account, such a privacy, right?
I still using Dropbox because it can run on multiple OS, I'm using Linux, MacOS, and sometimes Windows, but I consider to move to another provider which have e2e encryption.
boxcryptor.com works with Dropbox and can do this for you I believe, which might be a good solution for some?
Still, I'm also totally in favor of adding this to Dropbox natively instead of having to rely on a 3rd party solution. And totally agree with the comment made by some of the others that it's an essential option that you'd expect to see in a mature product like Dropbox.
I'm currently using Dropbox for non-private items. I'm using iDrive at additional cost to have a private encrypted backup that only I have the encryption key for. It's on me to know where the key is and have multiple backups in various places. I have an encrypted copy of the key on Dropbox.
You should offer self-control of the encryption key as a user option (all their decision and responsibility) with a list of any services that could be a problem that you use.
This is a must have option for every storing OTHER PEOPLE DATA storage.
Else it's law of life privacy violation.
I wait for someone from USA to start a court against such violation done by Microsoft, Dropbox, Google and other "storages".
There is no reason to believe that this has to be an opt-out scenario. It can be opt-in and even done per folder. This isn't trivial but it would be really nice to have and give me more confidence in storing confidential information on Dropbox.
This would be nice but it needs to be done correctly. I don't think dropbox would do it because normal users would get angry if they forget the password and can't get to their files. The security stuff seems nice to them, but if they loose their files they don't really care.
For now use Cryptomator, it is a pretty decent Open Source app for desktop and android that is compatible with google drive and doesn't cost a monthly fee (free on desktop, one time 10$ payment on mobile)
