About ten years ago, I received an email from an acquaintance, asking me to join her LinkedIn network. I sent her an email saying that I'd be glad to, but preferred to use LinkedIn with my work email only. She replied that she was by then considering leaving LinkedIn entirely. It developed that she had checked, or more likely failed to clear, a box allowing LinkedIn to see her email contact list. LinkedIn had then sent everyone in that list an invitation to join her network. She was embarrassed and angry.
This week, a friend sent me a link to a folder that he had set up on Dropbox. He wished to be sure that he had set it up properly, and since the intended user was not technically proficient, he wanted someone to test who could give a clear account of any difficulties. There were no technical difficulties; he had set the folder up correctly.
However, I found to my annoyance that when I signed in using my Google account that Dropbox wished to see my contact list. It had a moderately plausible reason for the request, to make it easier for me to share files with them. Unfortunately, there is no good way to take those contacts out of Dropbox as long as I use my Google account to log in. The user is I suppose expected to trust Dropbox to use the contacts only for proper purposes, or maybe just to regard them as an exchange for the 2 GB of free storage. Dropbox may be trustworthy, but it becomes harder to find reasons to trust such companies.
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