NOT Shared Documents LEAKED!

[Piknockyou]

Dear Dropbox,

I am shocked.

When you have a Word- or Excel-File in your Dropbox either by creating it on Dropbox Web or Creating or Moving it in your Dropbox Desktop Folder, everyone with a link has access to it, even though you NEVER created a link to those files.

How can one get a link then?

If you, as the owner, open the file with Dropbox Web through "Word/Excel for the web" a link is generated which you can find in the browser bar after opening the file. Here a 2 examples:

Test Excel 

Test Word 

(EDIT: Removed by me)

As you can see in this Dropbox Web overview no link was ever created (which is usually indicated by a chain symbol next to "Only you"):

So everyone with these "generated" links has access to your sensitive data in those documents by default!!

Please do something about it!

Kind reagards.

[Walter]

Hi @Piknockyou; thanks for posting on our Community!

It seems like these are Microsoft files and, as mentioned in the relevant Help Center article, when you create a new file through Office Online, a link to this file is automatically saved to Dropbox for easy access. 

In this case, those could have been generated if you accessed those files via Office Online; even after uploading them via the desktop application. 

Note that this is to bring additional sharing functionality to Microsoft Office files in your Dropbox account, and to bring the sharing experience in line with that of G-Suite files in Dropbox.

I hope this helps clear things up and please let me know if you have any more questions. 

[Piknockyou]

I think Dropbox is not making it clear enough.

I am sure most of the users don't know that a sharable link is created, when you open the document by "Word/Excel for the web".

I can unshare it manually by following this screenshot.

Why don't you set it to "Unshared file" by default when the document is opened by Office web?