From the “like seriously??” department comes news that Dropbox may be sending your data to Open AI:
On Wednesday, news quickly spread on social media about a new enabled-by-default Dropbox setting that shares your Dropbox data with OpenAI for an experimental AI-powered search feature. Dropbox says that user data shared with third-party AI partners isn’t used to train AI models and is deleted within 30 days.
Even with assurances of data privacy laid out by Dropbox on an AI privacy FAQ page, the discovery that the setting had been enabled by default upset some Dropbox users. The setting was first noticed by writer Winifred Burton, who shared information about the Third-party AI setting through Bluesky on Tuesday, and frequent AI critic Karla Ortiz shared more information about it on X.
Ortiz expressed worries that the data might be trained secretly without consent. In its FAQ, Dropbox contradicts this claim, saying, “We won’t let our third-party partners train their models on our user data without consent.”
Either way, communication about the change could have been clearer. AI researcher Simon Willison wrote, “Great example here of how careful companies need to be in clearly communicating what’s going on with AI access to personal data.”
Yikes! That’s really bad. Now Dropbox has not provided a comment beyond the FAQ above. Thus I will be interested to see what they say and how they handle this. But if this bothers you, and it should, then here’s how you opt out of this:
Disabling the feature is easy if you prefer not to share Dropbox data with OpenAI. Log into your Dropbox account on a desktop web browser, then click your profile photo > Settings > Third-party AI. This link may take you to that page more quickly. On that page, click the switch beside “Use artificial intelligence (AI) from third-party partners so you can work faster in Dropbox” to toggle it into the “Off” position.
Dropbox better have a good reason for this because right now, this is sketchy AF as the kids say.
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This entry was posted on December 13, 2023 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Dropbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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If You Use Dropbox, It Could Be Sending Your Data To Open AI
From the “like seriously??” department comes news that Dropbox may be sending your data to Open AI:
On Wednesday, news quickly spread on social media about a new enabled-by-default Dropbox setting that shares your Dropbox data with OpenAI for an experimental AI-powered search feature. Dropbox says that user data shared with third-party AI partners isn’t used to train AI models and is deleted within 30 days.
Even with assurances of data privacy laid out by Dropbox on an AI privacy FAQ page, the discovery that the setting had been enabled by default upset some Dropbox users. The setting was first noticed by writer Winifred Burton, who shared information about the Third-party AI setting through Bluesky on Tuesday, and frequent AI critic Karla Ortiz shared more information about it on X.
Ortiz expressed worries that the data might be trained secretly without consent. In its FAQ, Dropbox contradicts this claim, saying, “We won’t let our third-party partners train their models on our user data without consent.”
Either way, communication about the change could have been clearer. AI researcher Simon Willison wrote, “Great example here of how careful companies need to be in clearly communicating what’s going on with AI access to personal data.”
Yikes! That’s really bad. Now Dropbox has not provided a comment beyond the FAQ above. Thus I will be interested to see what they say and how they handle this. But if this bothers you, and it should, then here’s how you opt out of this:
Disabling the feature is easy if you prefer not to share Dropbox data with OpenAI. Log into your Dropbox account on a desktop web browser, then click your profile photo > Settings > Third-party AI. This link may take you to that page more quickly. On that page, click the switch beside “Use artificial intelligence (AI) from third-party partners so you can work faster in Dropbox” to toggle it into the “Off” position.
Dropbox better have a good reason for this because right now, this is sketchy AF as the kids say.
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This entry was posted on December 13, 2023 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Dropbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.