Privacy: All Your Data Are Belong To Us

This week Dropbox changed its terms of service, as reported by the essential Business Insider. Under its new policy, Dropbox says that it will cooperate with “United States law enforcement when it receives valid legal process” and may, if necessary, decrypt the private files in Dropbox folders, allowing them to be read by government snoops.

Not that Dropbox deserves to be singled out, except that I had just gotten around to using it. As David Gerwirtz points out on ZDNet's government blog, the lead could have cited Gmail. Or any Google app requiring sign-up. Or Amazon’s cloud. Or Hotmail. Or any of Yahoo’s many services. Or almost any other online service.

The rest of the story: If you have something to hide from the government, don't use Dropbox by David Gewirtz (ZDNet Government 2011-04-18)