Dropbox spooks users by sending data to OpenAI for AI search features
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
On Wednesday, news quickly spread on social media about a new enabled-by-default Dropbox setting that shares your Dropbox data with OpenAI for an experimental AI-powered search feature. Dropbox says that user data shared with third-party AI partners isn't used to train AI models and is deleted within 30 days.
Even with assurances of data privacy laid out by Dropbox on an AI privacy FAQ page, the discovery that the setting had been enabled by default upset some Dropbox users. The setting was first noticed by writer Winifred Burton, who shared information about the Third-party AI setting through Bluesky on Tuesday, and frequent AI critic Karla Ortiz shared more information about it on X.
Ortiz expressed worries that the data might be trained secretly without consent. In its FAQ, Dropbox contradicts this claim, saying, "We won’t let our third-party partners train their models on our user data without consent."