We want to let you know about some upcoming updates to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. These updates will go into effect on March 24, 2014.
You can find more details on our blog, but here’s a quick overview:
We’re adding an arbitration section to our updated Terms of Service. Arbitration is a quick and efficient way to resolve disputes, and it provides an alternative to things like state or federal courts where the process could take months or even years. If you don’t want to agree to arbitration, you can easily opt out via an online form, within 30-days of these Terms becoming effective. This form, and other details, are available on our blog. We’ve added a section to our Privacy Policy that discusses our recently launched Government Data Request Principles. We’ve also made clarifications to better explain how our services will use your information. For example, we explain that when you give us access to your contacts, we’ll store them so that you – and only you – can do things like share your stuff easily, no matter what device you’re using. We’ve also updated our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy to better explain and reflect our growing list of features for Dropbox for Business customers.
While we’ve simplified much of the language, our commitment to keeping your stuff safe and secure hasn’t changed. We don’t sell your personal information to third parties. We don’t serve ads based on the stuff you store in our services. As always, your stuff is yours.
If you have any questions about these updates, you can read more on our blog or email us at tos-questions@dropbox.com.
Thanks for using Dropbox!
- The Dropbox Team
These terms are always manufactured to cover the back - What is new here is the arbitration clause.
Arbitration is a way of settling disputes out of court - a kind of private judge judy (only there are no judges only experts from the business maybe colleges or competitors of Dropbox). And they basically say "you win" and "you lose" and that is it - the matter is settled. This is cheaper and faster than waiting for the courts.
So Dropbox wants you to accept that up front so that you are cut of from going to court in the future.
So is this a good idea?
How do we now that Dropbox not already has compromised our data so heavily that they simply are running this as a "cut losses" strategy? Maybe they already know that they never could win class action lawsuits? What if they have given away the data of all European (you know foreigners) users to the NSA - how would they stand against an European lawsuit?
It makes sense for the business - it is their job to reduce risk. It is not obvious that it makes sense for Dropbox users.
As it looks it could not hurt to opt out of this which you can do here (I have done it. It has no negative effects and it is easily done.)
It is a common way of settling things between business "partners" though.
It is also possible to cancel your account and Dropbox will delete all your data according to the terms - that is a good thing. I can tell you that it was almost impossible to cancel Facebook even if I had not completed the registration - I broke off when I came to the terms.
Manjaro 64bit on the main box -Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz and nVidia Corporation GT200b [GeForce GTX 275] (rev a1. + Centos on the server - Arch on the laptop. "There are no stupid questions - Only stupid answers!"
