Dropbox's Jan 1st 2027 terms of service

Major changes:

1. You must be 18 to use Dropbox. Previously, you had to be 13 if in the United States, or 16 if higher. Dropbox may use information "Dropbox may use and rely on information from third parties, including age signals from app stores, for the purpose of enforcing this restriction."

2. Your account may be terminated if you don't have a Paid account and haven't accessed for 6 months. Previously, it was 12 months.

3. If you have multiple accounts tied to the same email address, and one is banned, the others may also be banned.

4. "Refunds are only issued if required by law." -> "Refunds are only issued in limited circumstances or if required by law."

5. You automatically agree to the new terms if you continue to have an account. Previously, it was only if you continued to use the service.

6. Some terms covering Teams accounts.

Does this mean that young adults that work for companies that use Dropbox, cannot collaborate with others using Dropbox?

Diffchecker for the save

https://www.diffchecker.com/QD8AKShC/

Amazing Dropbox went from a brilliantly simple service to this stagnating corporate swamp of ooze. Yet another fascinating example of how headcount correlates with quality decline.

Looks like the major changes are:

- some stuff about Teams that's mostly only relevant if you're using your work email for a personal account

- minimium age 13 -> 18; add "Dropbox may use and rely on information from third parties, including age signals from app stores, for the purpose of enforcing this restriction."

- free accounts may be terminated after 6 months of no use (previously 12 months)

- removed "If you reside in the EU, the European Commission provides for an online dispute resolution platform, which you can access here: https://ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr." from the dispute resolution process.

I guess teenagers don't have any need to sync files, eh? Hate to see this gradual erosion of internet access for young people - I'd bet half the notable members of this very site started their career trajectory by learning how to break/fix computers in middle school or before

Funny that this is the only Dropbox post I've seen on HN besides infamous references to their launch post. You'd think there would be plenty of interesting improvements to make.

Having been a paid user for the last decade my current experience is just getting error messages on my phone every week that something failed to sync, and that I have to re-enter the app every ~month to disable/enable syncing for my offline files, otherwise it doesn't work. I can't remember any time I've been pleasantly surprised by any change to the service.

This leaves a lot of questions. Why are they raising the age limit? What legislation demands this? Will other services follow? And what if parents give consent? Are users on a family plan now forced to kick off their kids from the joined plan?

Dropbox will be one of the next Bending Spoons acquisitions. Low growth, none of the upsell or product extension things they've done have really worked out, and no-one's idea of what the future looks like.

I've been a happy customer of Tresorit for several years now. Give them a try if you're fed up with Dropbox.

At first I was selective in what folders I synced but after a few months I decided to just sync my entire workspace folder with everything in it.

Incredibly convenient, everything is automatically synced between my desktop and laptop.

If you go this route look into filters, it's not a very advertised feature but works great for excluding build output, venvs and other stuff.

Why hasn't anyone created a windows and mac client that git pushes changes to remote after file activities of local computer, and polls remote repo every 1 minute for changes to pull? I'd gladly pay for that. :-)

What’s a good Dropbox alternative? Especially for Macs. Feels like they spent twenty years just making the Mac client worse.

I switched to Sync last year. Much cheaper, better quality.

If the enshittification continues, it might be time to go back to rsync [0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Diff or it didn't happen

i'm so happy with syncthing project.

curl and ftp never refuse to work, or willfully erase your backup files on their own initiative. Just saying.

TL;DR?

[flagged]