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Backing up our lives on Dropbox

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Backing up our lives on Dropbox

When a failing company controls your passport

Vicki Boykis
Oct 10, 2019
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Backing up our lives on Dropbox

vicki.substack.com
Twitter avatar for @vboykis
Vicki B🎃ykis @vboykis
"Dropbox brings your files together, in one central place. They’re easy to find and safely synced across all your devices." Natalia Goncharova, 1920 #devart
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6:13 PM ∙ Feb 7, 2018

Ever since I took my first international trip when I was a teenager, my parents have packed photocopies of their passports in our luggage. In my adulthood, I’ve taken to doing the same thing.

Over the last couple trips, though, I’ve noticed that I’ve stopped doing it as much. What’s the worst that’s going to happen? I can always pull up the necessary information on my cell phone, goes my reasoning.

As someone who is a naturalized US citizen (my parents passed the test when I was young), I’ve never given much thought about documentation outside of making sure to bring my passport when I travel abroad. 

But having your passport with you has always been an extra-stressful moment. There is already anxiety when you cross borders, even as a US citizen: Will you be pulled aside? Will you have your face scanned?

Will you get your device searched? There are now, unsurprisingly, whole essays about how to make sure your device, your digital life, is secure at border crossings.

And now there is the additional component of digital anxiety that immigrants in the United States today in particular are exposed to, a fact that I was clued into with this tweet: 

Twitter avatar for @borisjabes
Boris Jabes @borisjabes
You know you’re an immigrant when you have passport photos ready to go in your Dropbox.
12:05 AM ∙ Oct 4, 2019

Only a few days later, I saw this one: 

Twitter avatar for @MineDogucu
Mine Dogucu @MineDogucu
Well, I have to prove US Immigration that I have a PhD. They would accept a copy as proof when I am entering the country but I am so paranoid (based on prior experience) that I carry my original diploma with me when I am traveling. Not kidding.
Twitter avatar for @robertnulrich
Rob Ulrich, M.S. (he/they) @robertnulrich
Question: Do you display your diplomas? If so, where? Mine are just sitting sadly in a dark corner of my apartment right now #AcademicChatter
5:19 PM ∙ Oct 5, 2019
9Likes2Retweets

Then, of course, there was the incident of the NASA employee detained at customs shortly after the enactment (and subsequent withdrawal) of the travel ban: 

Bikkannavar says he was detained by US Customs and Border Patrol and pressured to give the CBP agents his phone and access PIN. Since the phone was issued by NASA, it may have contained sensitive material that wasn’t supposed to be shared. Bikkannavar’s phone was returned to him after it was searched by CBP, but he doesn’t know exactly what information officials might have taken from the device.

The JPL scientist returned to the US four days after the signing of a sweeping and controversial executive order on travel into the country. The travel ban caused chaos at airports across the United States, as people with visas and green cards found themselves detained, or facing deportation. 

As a result, many people who think they might have problems at the border are organizing their entire life’s worth of documentation in Dropbox.

Twitter avatar for @chhopsky
Chris '🕸dms that say "we need to talk"🕸' Pollock @chhopsky
@DavidFeng i keep a dropbox folder with: - birth certificate - us/ca/au drivers licenses - passport (all pages. yes this matters) - last 10 years of leases for housing - medicare card (au/ca) - uni degree + transcript - last electricity bill us/ca/au - work permit ca - ESTA us / ETA ca 😅
3:04 PM ∙ Sep 26, 2019

Immigrants and government employees aren’t the only ones facing this issue; travelers in general are also adopting the methodology (including...professional wrestlers? Anyone at Normocre Wrestling Tech newsletter want to investigate?)

Twitter avatar for @JordynneGrace
Trisha Parker @JordynneGrace
RE: professional wrestlers. Sharing this to show wrestlers a good way to impress promoters and make lives easier. Create a Dropbox folder “For Promotions” with: - Entrance music - Passport - Emergency contact/your contact info - Announcer notes - Promo graphics Here’s mine! 🙂N
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11:48 AM ∙ May 29, 2019
2,492Likes403Retweets

Many “normal” travelers are being urged to do so by companies that are in the travel industry:

Twitter avatar for @Skyscanner
Skyscanner @Skyscanner
A5: Save a scanned copy of your passport and other important documents in your email or @Dropbox. Can be a life saver! #lpchat
4:55 PM ∙ Dec 18, 2014
11Likes1Retweet

And, even outside the travel industry, for emergency/disaster storage: 

Twitter avatar for @ruckerworks
Steven S Williamson @ruckerworks
A great tip I can recommend is to get a free (or paid) Dropbox or similar online file storage account. Scan important documents, including your passport and insurance policies, and store them in the cloud. You can access them from your phone. #CarrFire
Twitter avatar for @Kittvix
Kitta @Kittvix
What to do if you're evacuated. Also, check in on social media to let everyone know you're safe. #CarrFire #CalFire #Redding https://t.co/JY4MKNqFfs
6:36 PM ∙ Jul 27, 2018
3Likes5Retweets

What’s more, Dropbox isn’t the only cloud storage provider profiting from this. Microsoft is also getting in on the action, by suggesting you keep all your documents in their newly-launched Personal Vault on OneDrive (h/t Jowanza) . 

What does it mean for us to keep our lives on Dropbox, or on OneDrive? How do we know they’re going to be secure?

Well, Dropbox reassuringly tells us so with a Security Site. (Side note: If you ever need to convey anything serious in a casual way, blue and white and gray are the way to go - serious, but mellow at the same time. We got this, Dropbox’s security site says, complete with very professional drawings of locked folders.)

They showcase their security architecture in broad terms, just enough to make the average layperson believe They Got This. 

There are a couple of interesting things about Dropbox, though.

First, they’ve recently migrated from the AWS cloud back to an on-prem environment (aka they are themselves hosting and running the servers). In some cases, this can be a disaster move. It remains to be seen whether this is the case for Dropbox. Because Dropbox employs so many high-caliber technical experts (including Guido Van Rossum, who created Python), it potentially gives them better fine-grained control over privacy: 

Further, I think it becomes clear to certain companies — especially companies storing sensitive or important user data — that blaming their cloud provider for breaches or downtime isn’t going to fly for too long. Debating whether Dropbox can do a better job of these things than AWS or Google can almost misses the point (although it probably has the engineering resources to do a damn fine job). Dropbox needs to be able to act on any issues as quickly as possible without waiting on somebody else (which requires controlling and understanding the infrastructure) and its users need to know the company is willing and able to do so.

However, the downside is that letting someone else handle server security is almost always a better proposition, particularly given Dropbox’s history of password leakage issues. One could argue that all of that stuff happened in the past. But, what’s to say it won’t again? 

Second, they’ve made some interesting choices for their board, most notably Condoleezza Rice, who served as Secretary of State during the Bush administration. There was an enormous uproar from users when they found out about the appointment, resulting in the #DropDropbox campaign. Dropbox never backed down and only issued a mumbly statement about how transparency would continue even as she was on the board. (By the way, I can no longer find this statement on their blog.)

Even regardless of her actual political affiliation, the fact that she has government connections can be seen as begging a very important question: what does Dropbox need with government connections? Presumably government contracts. What does it mean for an American organization that stores all your most sensitive information, particularly for citizens of countries that are not the United States that use Dropbox, to have government contracts? I’ll leave that as an exercise for actual journalists to look into.

Third, and most important for anyone relying on the security of Dropbox when they’re standing in front of a customs agent, the company’s stock is going down. Way down. All the important financial leading indicators are negative, and Microsoft’s introduction of Vault doesn’t bode well for the ailing tech darling.

Just as tellingly, Dropbox recently went through a redesign.

My Normcore opinion is that anytime a company decides to do a redesign, it’s out of ideas and in trouble. 

Twitter avatar for @vboykis
Vicki B🎃ykis @vboykis
Vicki's Rule of Tech #231: Whenever a company starts showing you logo updates as news items, they're out of real ideas. (I say this as someone who used to love Evernote.)
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2:47 PM ∙ Aug 29, 2018
62Likes4Retweets

Dropbox did a (horrifyingly questionable) redesign in 2017.  The clock is ticking. 

So, what to do, for the hundreds of thousands of people storing their most important life documents in Dropbox? Follow the rule of old-school operational redundancy: store them in three places. Back them up in a second cloud service (S3? Microsoft’s Vault?) and be ready to have them gone at a moment’s notice, so that you have peace of mind when traveling.

For me personally, I’m going to dust off the photocopies again. It seems safer that way.

What I’m reading lately

  1. This article about raising modern kids on tech (from VC Fred Wilson’s wife) is spot on.

  2. This seems crazy to me, but as long as it gets the kids reading, I guess?

    Twitter avatar for @beeonaposy
    Caitlin Hudon👩🏼‍💻 @beeonaposy
    "Last year, the New York Public Library released an experiment to put the full text of novels in its Instagram Stories. Today, an estimated 300,000 people are reading books this way." 🤯 fastcompany.com/90392917/the-n…
    fastcompany.comHundreds of thousands of people read novels on Instagram. They may be the futureLast year, the New York Public Library released an experiment to put the full text of novels in its Instagram Stories. Today, an estimated 300,000 people are reading books this way.
    1:13 PM ∙ Oct 9, 2019
    21Likes7Retweets
  3. How to have a day job and a newsletter, I mean night job

  4. Deep learning at Airbnb


About the Author and Newsletter

I’m a data scientist in Philadelphia. This newsletter is about tech topics I don’t see covered in the media. Most of my free time is spent kid-wrangling, reading, and writing bad tweets. I also have longer opinions on things. Find out more here or follow me on Twitter.

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