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The team admin could access my private folder when I joined the team
I had a personal Dropbox account for a decade. In the last 2 years, I have been included in a team account. I remember how the system looked skecthy and not reassuring in terms of privacy after joining the team, but I trust dropbox. My home folder had looked "only" shared with myself.
Yesterday, my team leader decided to shut down the team account, but I lost all my personal/private files. Then I learned, somehow the team leader could move my files without my permission and put them all to a team member's space. My team member now has full access to my files. What kind of a irresponsibility is this? How could Dropbox, which is in bussiness for more than a decade, allow that? I had my old tax forms, bills, ID scans etc. in there, now someone else can access them? How? My privacy is violated, and how can I trust dropbox ever again?
5 Replies
- Jay
Dropbox Community Moderator
Hi mu7, thanks for bringing this to our attention.
I understand your concern regarding the matter of your privacy within a Dropbox team.
When a person joins a Dropbox team, you get the option to merge your account and files to the team, or to keep your files separate in a different Dropbox account.
As it sounds like you merged the account, this means that the team admin would have access to all your files, as they would technically become the owner of your account.
We do appreciate the feedback on this matter, and we take all comments into consideration when improving the Dropbox site and services.
Don't you think such an important thing should have been put to my attention more clearly? I don't remember I have been warned about this. My issue is a nightmare at the moment. The team member deleted the files, but she can't delete them entirely from "Deleted items" folder as she doesn't have permission either. All my privacy is in the hands of other people. Begging people to remove my sensitive material to be deleted. Nice work, thank you!
- Jay
Thank you for the details, and I understand your frustration over your personal files that can't be deleted from the team.
It's likely that the team admin has disabled the option to permanently delete files from the team. This means that only they would be able to permanently delete those files.
- Mark
Super User II
Don't you think such an important thing should have been put to my attention more clearly
You literally have to almost force it to use the current email as part of the onboarding. Dropbox tries to tell you to use a new one if you already have an account.
Unfortunately (as we all do... I am the same!) very few people actually read these prompts and just hit next/next/next.
You are right, but I remember reading the prompts during the merge process and I don't remember reading anything like my team admin "can access my files" at all. Isn't this important enough to be warned in the highest level? We trust on dropbox on our privacy, and this is what we get?
