Painting way too broad a brush stroke. Just because an idiotic corporation has no idea how to administer their cloud products doesn't mean they are all bad. I've been using dropbox for years and I've never heard of anyone anywhere having their account shut down for having a nude photo.
In fact, I know there's tons of pirated content on dropbox because when I add a pirated movie, 9 times out of 10 it get's synced immediately. That means that file exists there already and they can identify it via MD5 hash. They could have banned it based on some sort of blacklist, but they didn't.
Probably because they understand that if they did, they would piss their paying customers off. So why spend effort trying to do that?
And that's how you get into trouble. You have to assume the good actors will at some point in the future execute a bad tactic (via incompetent or even malicious employees) and act accordingly. This doesn't mean you have to avoid cloud storage services altogether. The right thing to do is encrypt all your files before uploading.
Absolutely. I don't mean to suggest that nobody should ever use cloud services.
But you should be aware that things like this happen, and that there are policies which let them happen.
Dropbox might not be interested in blocking pirated content at the moment, but this could change in the future. Their polices already say that it isn't allowed, so what would you do if all of your pirated movies just disappeared one day?
Simple: I'd stop paying for dropbox. And not only if they did this to me, but if I found out from a reliable source that they were doing this to anyone.
I figure that's a good enough incentive for them to not try to monitor their files.
But yeah, I pretty much agree with your basic point to not solely rely on cloud services. Always have a physical backup of stuff you actually want/need.
Wasn't Dropbox involved in a pretty big privacy scandal a year or two ago when people found out they weren't encrypting their files properly or something?
I believe Dropbox create a hash for all users' files that point to a single file hosted on Dropbox, so Dropbox save the space that would have been occupied by the - according to them - redundant files. You could say that a Dropbox repo is like a list of references to non-redundant files hosted by Dropbox.
In finding any disagreeable content, I believe the implication was that Dropbox could map it the other way around from the infracting file to a list of users with the file's hash.
People that never looked at what dropbox does were shocked that dropbox has the technical ability to look at file contents. All encryption is done on the dropbox servers.
In fact, I know there's tons of pirated content on dropbox because when I add a pirated movie, 9 times out of 10 it get's synced immediately. That means that file exists there already and they can identify it via MD5 hash. They could have banned it based on some sort of blacklist, but they didn't.
Probably because they understand that if they did, they would piss their paying customers off. So why spend effort trying to do that?