Issues include a June 2011 authentication problem that let accounts be accessed for several hours without passwords a July 2011 privacy policy update with language suggesting Dropbox had ownership of users' data concerns about Dropbox employee access to users' information July 2012 email spam with reoccurrence in February 2013 leaked government documents in June 2013 with information that Dropbox was being considered for inclusion in the National Security Agency's PRISM surveillance program a July 2014 comment from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden criticizing Dropbox's encryption the leak of 68 million account passwords on the Internet in August 2016 and a January 2017 accidental data restoration incident where years-old supposedly deleted files reappeared in users' accounts.Īpril 2011 user authentication file information ĭropbox has been criticized by the independent security researcher Derek Newton, who wrote in April 2011 that Dropbox stored user authentication information in a file on the computer that was 'completely portable and is not tied to the system in any way'. Criticism of Dropbox, an American company specializing in cloud storage and file synchronization and their flagship service of the same name, centers around various forms of security and privacy controversies.

Dropbox cloud security