Lost access to Dropbox Paper docs/folders

Hi stephenstephen, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

When a team member is deleted, they lose access to all Paper documents, since at the moment of joining the team, the ownership changed to the team admin.

Just for clarification, are these files visible in your Dropbox folder? Are you able to transfer them to your personal account via a shared folder?

This will help me to assist further!

Thanks for the response Jay!

The files are not visible in my Dropbox folder, only when I visit paper.dropbox.com.

I believe this means I'm on the pre-2020 release of Dropbox Paper. Is that what you were asking?

Hey stephenstephen, you are indeed correct about the version of Paper that you're using.

Are you able to share the documents themselves from your current team account to your personal one?

Thanks Hannah. Yes I can share them from my team account to my personal account and I have, however I would like to have ownership transferred back to my personal account for the following reasons:

- Several of these documents contain confidential information related to different businesses I've worked with and should not exist within the domain of the current team.

- Should I ever leave this team, I want to retain ownership of these documents and the team admin should not be granted access to/ownership of these files.

A Dropbox support representative previously helped me get ownership of some of these files transferred back, but I have since found additional files that were affected and I am having difficulty getting these transferred.

Maybe more significantly, I wanted to point out what I think is a serious privacy issue. In my case it was private business information that was shared, but for the sake of argumentation imagine the document contained private photos shared confidentially with a trusted partner.

My motivation for joining the team was an ability to collaborate on specific files and increased storage.

It was not clear to me that by joining the team I was also giving consent to the team administrator to access and, in the event that I left or was removed from the team, transferring ownership and revoking my own access to my private files that I had created from my personal dropbox account prior to joining the team.

My point is that this behavior has the potential to cause serious harm and at the very least I think stronger guardrails ought to be put in place.

Thanks for getting back to me, Stephen.

At the moment, you can share Paper docs between team and personal accounts, but you can't transfer doc ownership from a team account to a personal account.

I completely understand where you're coming from, though, and I can assure you that I have passed your feedback along to our team.

As a workaround right now, I would suggest creating new docs in your personal account and copying over the contents of the original ones, so that the personal account can be the owner of the new docs.

I hope this helps.

Thanks Hannah, I appreciate you passing along my concern. 

In terms of resolving my specific issue, is there any possibility of following up on this conversation outside of a public forum?

Thankfully the affected parties are relatively understanding, but it is a serious issue that this confidential information was made available to individuals who should not have had access to it without my direct consent.

The workaround isn't entirely satisfactory since there are a large number of documents that would have to be copied and reshared. 

As I mentioned, in the past, a representative successfully transferred ownership of a number of these documents from the team account to my personal account, but since receiving that support I've come across additional files that were missed in that original process. 

I am currently the owner of (and can provide the links to) the remaining files that need to be transferred.

Thanks!

Hi again, Stephen.

I completely understand your point of view, however, the thing is that by joining a Dropbox Business team, you are giving consent and ownership of all the data over to the admin.

Nonetheless, it is possible to pass ownership of the Paper docs to a member of the same Dropbox Business team; so another workaround could be for the admin of your team to re-invite your personal account to the team, pass the ownership of the docs back to the preferred account and then remove it from the team again.

This time, the admin will need to make sure to convert your account to an individual one (instead of simply deleting you), so that ownership of the docs remains to you and the files don't get transferred to the admin again.

Lastly, if you'd like to contact our support team, you should be able to do so from this page, since you're on a Business team at the moment.

Thanks Hannah, that sounds like a much better solution!

I just want to make sure I understand correctly.

If I remember correctly, I chose to convert my team account to an individual account from my end. Would the behavior re: file ownership be different if the conversion is initiated by the team admin?

Like I said, I didn't actually use dropbox paper while my personal account was a part of the team, but as far as I know the paper docs whose ownership was transferred to the team admin were still owned by me and I never shared them with any of the team members before I initiated the conversion. 

The support page leaves me questioning how my situation will be handled:

It says Private unshared Paper docs and Paper docs shared by external (non-team) users (i.e. owned by an external user?) will be transferred to the basic account, and it says Paper docs shared between member and the team will not be transferred back, but it doesn't say anything about Paper docs that are owned by the account holder and shared with external users but not shared with team users will be treated.

And to reiterate I do think an greater safety factor is needed to prevent this kind of situation. I'm generally pretty cautious, but I was invited to the team to collaborate on a specific project with an expectation to jump in and get started immediately. Under pressure to accept the invitation and begin work promptly, I don't think the full implications of what I was consenting to were as clear to me as they should have been.

Can you clarify something for me, Stephen?

You mentioned that you (when you were a team member) converted your account back to an individual one.

Can you let me know which steps you followed to accomplish that?