HACKER Q&A
📣 shaunpud

Tech Peeps and Privacy


I recently discovered Omarchy, not that I'm using it, but I really like the passion from dhh, and to be honest the script looks amazing. But I noticed he has dedicated a script for Dropbox, and uses it. Now I'm old enough to be an early adopter of Dropbox, and I remember clearly one particular email from them saying how interesting it is for users using their service for x and y, and since then I assume they can see _everything_ which really put me off. So I guess my question is how can people heavily in the tech industry use third party tools (Dropbox, github, etc) and not be too concerned about other eyes looking over their files/code/data/etc?

  👤 JohnFen Accepted Answer ✓
Well, I don't use those services personally, in part (but certainly not only) because of such security issues.

However, when it comes to code, I think most people using such services are intending to make the code available to the public anyway. In those cases, there isn't really a privacy component as privacy the opposite of what they want.

👤 barnabee
Some of us limit how and when we use those tools, or avoid them entirely.

I use GitHub for code I _want_ to share with the world and to access and work on code made by others. I don't use Dropbox daty to day (technically I have an old account with a few unimportant things on, but I only access it via the web). I use Google's suite of tools only for things I'm not really fussed about or to access stuff made by others (I do have a personal Gmail account but I basically only use it for mailing lists, password resets, and to get invoices and confirmations). I use tools like Slack, Discord, etc. where I'm required to for things I'm working on, but that's someone else's privacy call.

I could go on…

For my personal data I have a NAS at home (with encrypted backups to Glacier), use Syncthing pretty heavily, and a few (general e2e encryped) cloud services for specific use cases.