Dropbox Accused of Lying About Security

lee1 writes "Dropbox faces a possible FTC investigation because of misleading statements it has made about the privacy and security of its 25 million users' files. The cloud storage company previously claimed that it was impossible for its employees to access file contents, but in fact, as the encryption keys are in their possession, this is false. The complaint (PDF) points out that their false security claims gave Dropbox a competitive advantage over other firms offering similar services who actually did provide secure encryption."

Security is NOT an issue with The Cloud.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.

The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.

And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.

My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.

Re:Security is NOT an issue with The Cloud.

[RightwingNutjob]

My guess is all your documents are encrypted with ExecuSpeak already. So you're good.

Re:Seconded

[ColdWetDog]

"I enjoy intercourse with small domestic fauna."

Thanks for qualifying that. Heaven forbid you having conjugal relations with foreign animals. That would be just perverse.

Re:Security is NOT an issue with The Cloud.

[jonamous++]

I'm both amused and concerned that I've heard statements similar to the ones that you have made at my own workplace. *sigh*