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Dropbox's Jan 1st 2027 terms of service

27 points simonebrunozzi 1 hour ago 47 comments

xtoilette 1 hour ago | parent

TL;DR?

chrisandchris 52 minutes ago | parent

I did a comparison with an LLM of my choice and there was no meaningful difference (or nothing I would consider HN-worthy).

sph 45 minutes ago | parent

Given the HN-worthy differences posted by others, here’s another example of why it’s not a good idea to delegate your thinking to LLMs.

kenferry 21 minutes ago | parent

I… guess? I'm not sure why this was posted. None of these changes seem important.

0x20Fearless 35 minutes ago | parent

I saw a comment and didn’t prompt an LLM and see the whole difference: https://www.diffchecker.com/QD8AKShC/

charcircuit 51 minutes ago | parent

- You must be 18+

- You must access Dropbox every 6 months (from 12) if you have a free to ensure they don't delete your account

webprofusion 52 minutes ago | parent

Diff or it didn't happen

nixass 50 minutes ago | parent

Well, diff it then?

GuestFAUniverse 46 minutes ago | parent

(I'm a former user of dropbox.)

Good services make change explicit.

Dropbox seems to have degraded into incompetence. Unable to provide good services.

adrithmetiqa 34 minutes ago | parent

Long time Dropbox user here. I would disagree. In my opinion they still have the best file sync platform of the big providers, easily beating onedrive and Google drive for reliability, especially with hundreds of thousands of files.

GuestFAUniverse 49 minutes ago | parent

100%

It's 2026 and they're handling IT like pariahs of the stone age.

Even they grey beards of the 70s would have worked that out easily.

dannyw 45 minutes ago | parent

Oh it's probably intentional. I've seen efforts to simplify terms of service get rejected because "more people might read it if it's shorter".

haunter 52 minutes ago | parent

Diffchecker for the save

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

aurareturn 10 minutes ago | parent

Super useful. Any open source tools like this?

rlk 49 minutes ago | parent

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.

LoganDark 21 minutes ago | parent

That last point is funny... so arbitration agreements are designed to make the process intentionally more difficult. Can't provide too many hints!

big85 44 minutes ago | parent

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.

applfanboysbgon 36 minutes ago | parent

> 5. You automatically agree to the new terms if you continue to have an account.

I would really love to see courts throw this BS out.

necovek 9 minutes ago | parent

I agree with you in principle.

It would also potentially invalidate clauses like the one in GPL license too: "this version or any later version" — how can anyone consent to yet-unknown terms?

In this particular case and going after the summary from big85, there's one case of legal compliance (like age restrictions — it applies in appropriate jurisdictions even if the ToS is not updated) or maybe two (banning per-account vs per-owner), some widening of the terms to the benefit of the customer (like refunds being permitted in "special circumstances" on top of "required by law, with only "reductionist" change being about lowering service window for unused free accounts (in some jurisdictions, even this could be about respecting data privacy laws — companies are obligated to remove any data which is not used after a certain time, though I think this is 12 months even under GDPR).

As such, I believe this would not be a good case where you can bring enough light how this type of clause is harming one side to the contract.

Gabrys1 7 minutes ago | parent

For "this or any later version", I have always read this line as you get to choose which version you want to follow, not the one granting you the licence.

rpozarickij 26 minutes ago | parent

> Your account may be terminated if you don't have a Paid account and haven't accessed for 6 months

I hope file sync is treated as "access", otherwise this would make me anxious.

drgo 43 minutes ago | parent

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

egeozcan 28 minutes ago | parent

I didn't know about Sync. TIL someone had the guts to start a company named "Sync" in 2011.

xprnio 22 minutes ago | parent

Let that sync in

2b3a51 8 minutes ago | parent

Yes, brave name choice. I went to have a look and the home page is nice, well laid out, and has links to documents. Small free tier to put your feet in the shallow end, and a couple of monthly plans, one aimed at individuals and the other at orgs. Perhaps a family plan would have benefits?

Alas no linux support, not even an api to allow the use of some terminal command to get round GUI fragmentation. Searching for 'sync online storage with linux' leads to a recent redit thread and a Mint Linux forum thread.

hjkl0 29 minutes ago | parent

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

simongray 26 minutes ago | parent

Self-hosted Seafile + Tailscale works great for me.

NietTim 19 minutes ago | parent

If you only have ios and mac clients why not icloud?

LeoPanthera 18 minutes ago | parent

iCloud Drive is the obvious choice.

ascorbic 7 minutes ago | parent

I heard you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem

swiftcoder 22 minutes ago | parent

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

iLoveOncall 14 minutes ago | parent

This has nothing to do with that. They probably realized that teenagers are a small enough portion of their userbase that the loss of revenue (and probably lack thereof to be fair) is far outweighed by the opportunity to ask users for their ID.

ta988 13 minutes ago | parent

It will simply teach them how to go around those "protections". And put them at risk of using shaddy services to do so. Exactly like what happened with the war on drugs...

paul7986 7 minutes ago | parent

Hmmmmm today is a very different world compared to when we used the Internet to learn how to code. Now with Ai doing all the coding is learning how to code even happenning anymore?

Also, just talked two friends who work for mid-size companies and last week both of their CEOs told them to just point Ai to their Jira tickets to finish all their tasks. Anyone else hearing their CEOs instruct the same thing?

d0mine 6 minutes ago | parent

It is not about age. It is just a way to tie accounts to a real life identity.

It won't be surprising if the requirement comes from some alphabet agency.

lukeify 19 minutes ago | parent

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.

peri-cl 15 minutes ago | parent

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

ak39 14 minutes ago | parent

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. :-)

jonny2811 11 minutes ago | parent

i think that's kind of what rclone is https://github.com/rclone/rclone

haven't used it yet. i either back up my data with restic or sync it to other devices with syncthing, but those are tiny files (keepassxc dbs)

kristianc 10 minutes ago | parent

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.

duttish 9 minutes ago | parent

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.

sorbusherra 8 minutes ago | parent

i'm so happy with syncthing project.

Lukas_Skywalker 6 minutes ago | parent

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

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

pveierland 5 minutes ago | parent

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.