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Drop Dropbox - why? when they're all just as bad?

The Drop Dropbox campaign is poorly aimed.

The Drop Dropbox campaign is a shameful waste of time and effort. It’s making a scapegoat of one lady while ignoring much bigger problems.

Drop Dropbox came about after the announcement that Condoleezza Rice, former adviser to President George W. Bush and US Secretary of State, is to join the board of cloud storage provider, Dropbox.

The complaint seems to be that Ms. Rice is too closely aligned to the National Security Agency. It’s the NSA that has a program to collect information about everyone (not just ‘foreigners’ etc.) including documents and files stored on services like Dropbox.

It’s not fashionable these days, but I don’t like personal attacks, even though they seem acceptable in the media. I don’t agree with Ms. Rice’s politics nor many of the actions taken by governments she had a prominent role in. But the ‘Drop Dropbox’ campaign is trivializing the real and serious online privacy problems as well as giving an excuse for thinly veiled sexist and racist views.

The problem isn’t Condoleezza Rica … it’s the whole attitude of companies and governments that, despite platitudes, believe they have the right to intrude on the personal information of individuals.

These people complaining about one woman … where were those same people only three weeks ago when it was discovered that Microsoft itself hacked into an individual Hotmail account for their own self-interest? That wasn’t the NSA looking for terrorists, it was Microsoft protecting its income.

That whole thing got barely a ripple of complaint. Where was the ‘Skip SkyDrive’ ‘Hop off Hotmail’ ‘Opt out OneDrive’ campaigns about a real, not theoretical, privacy intrusion?

It’s not just Dropbox that has a loose attitude to customer privacy. Apple, Google and all the other cloud services are just as bad. Microsoft probably has the worst track record. The lack of real action to protect customer privacy infects the entire cloud industry.

Leave’ Condi’ alone … make the whole board of Dropbox, Cubby, Box, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google accountable for protecting their customers.

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