When you put something in your Public folder on Dropbox to share, you are asking Dropbox to re-publish that data. It can be used to share information with selected others or with the world.

ĭropbox can be used for more than just syncing your own private data. You must ensure you have the rights you need to grant us that permission. This license is solely to enable us to technically administer, display, and operate the Services. By submitting your stuff to the Services, you grant us (and those we work with to provide the Services) worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable rights to use, copy, distribute, prepare derivative works (such as translations or format conversions) of, perform, or publicly display that stuff to the extent reasonably necessary for the Service. We sometimes need your permission to do what you ask us to do with your stuff (for example, hosting, making public, or sharing your files). The portion that seems to be behind the panic is in this paragraph: Permission to share what you ask them to share So don’t trust what the bloggers say (I guess that includes me) and go read the Dropbox Terms for yourself. It appears some misleading (at best) and downright incorrect claims about the Dropbox Terms of Service are spreading via Twitter and blogs. And as always the main thing to keep in mind is that your 1Password data are well encrypted before ever being sent to Dropbox (or even written to your own disk). Those accusations are incorrect, and the Dropbox terms of service do not give them any rights to your data that you wouldn’t expect. Since then the net has been a-twitter with very frightening accusations about what Dropbox may do with your data.

Yesterday (July 1) Dropbox provided an update of their terms of service.

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