I made the mistake of choosing "2022" as my year of birth instead of my actual year of birth.
Obviously this is my mistake, but a warning to anyone else: I now have 48 hours to backup my files before I will be locked out of my account, and Dropbox support has been unable to confirm that they can fix the "issue" for me.
I think this is the single worst "feature" I've ever encountered in a software application. I'm honestly shocked.
No, it isn't. 2022 should not be a valid date of birth in the first place. And the account being locked because of that should probably also not happen without additional checks.
It's okay to have standards even when most UIs are bad.
So they have the coder (implementer) role covered, but not the "programmer" role ("thinker"/feature designer).
Leslie Lamport - Thinking Above the Code: ~ A lot of people like to think that they're thinking, but they don't really do much thinking. [1]
Evidently, there was no expectation that the coder/implementer was supposed to do any thinking here.
None of the "idea men" had the idea of "what if someone's cat walks across the keyboard when we ask them their birthday". That's the embarrassing failure here.
Recently the FTC came down hard[0] on Kurbo (aka Weight Watchers) for not doing enough/anything to stop children under 13 (COPPA) from making accounts. Since they're not confident there's no children with accounts, now all Kurbo's data is tainted and they have to delete all user data and destroy any "algorithms" derived from that data.
Historically Dropbox probably never asked for a user's age so they might worry they could run into this problem in the future. The threat of all a company's data being tainted is a huge one, so of course they're now overreacting a bit.
p.s. hopefully you can get your account fixed, but if not, you could use the amazing rclone[1] tool to copy your files off. (it's rsync for cloud storage). Or you could just put them in a folder shared with another DBX account.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/03/...
"the agency... marketed a weight loss app for use by children as young as eight and then collected their personal information without parental permission."
That is pretty wilful -- so we can be confident they have or had data targeted from children. Dropbox on the other hand -- I'm not sure how that case is similar. Are children now allowed to use cloud backup services? Why wouldn't they?
They might just want to be able to demonstrate to the FTC that they're confident there's no children with accounts, instead of just telling the FTC "it's well known children don't really use cloud storage services anyway so we never bothered to ask for age".
> Are children now allowed to use cloud backup services? Why wouldn't they?
It's basically a service for storing personal information, so probably not without parental consent.
My experience is that I can usually only go back to the 1930s.
I don't know, I felt really stupid when I entered the wrong year but since then I've grown increasingly frustrated by how poorly this feature has been implemented.
I think most people that commented in that thread were able to spot the cyanide dissolving into the drink
I'm going to look at rsync.net simply because their people hang out on here.
For the same storage with rsync.net you could be looking at $500.00/month, and I believe that is with single-location storage.
For example, an attacker will call up PayPal and give their name as the real name of a famous online personality. They will tell the support rep "Hey sorry, I signed up for this account but I'm only 12. Can you turn off my account?". The rep will assume it is a low risk/legit request and lock the account without doing any other checks. This has happened to lots of online streamers, like Ninja.
chaotic something
I'm never going back. Way better in every aspect than Dropbox.
NextCloud also sells a device with it preinstalled and easy to use
If it's possible to save and access files from any browser, from any location, set up an automatically syncing folder, and selectively share access with others, then you have an alternative to dropbox, and all the other cloud personal storage services. All of which nextcloud can do.
The differences just mean you don't prefer that particular alternative the same way as if you didn't like the color scheme, or more realistically say the need to make a microsoft account for onedrive, or the way google probably scans the contents of google drive etc.
They are all still alternatives with various pros & cons.
Setting up your own nextcloud on a publicly accessible service is no different.
The cons like effort and cost are noted.
The pro is there is no one else in control of your stuff and it's impossible to lose your account due to some age verification, or any other reason like "communiy standards" or billing dispute. The worst that can happen is your hosting provider can drop you, but that is a commodity and there are infinite other hosting providers and methods. Keep your own mirror so you don't care even if the hosting provider deletes everything.
If any alternative to dropbox has to be identical in every detail to qualify, then it has exactly the same problems as well. An alternative actually has to be different in some way or else it's not an alternative but just more of the same, and there is no point in that.
Looks like it starts at €3600 per year for the basic plan, but you can't buy it, you have to "get an offer" which is newspeak for have a salesperson call you for several hours to upsell you.
Definitely not a replacement for my $14/month Dropbox account.
If you work at Dropbox I think it could still be useful to raise some of the concerns mentioned here with whoever is the product owner of this feature.
Eventually, enough time passed that my birthdate became valid and I was able to proceed. It was annoying, but honestly it was probably less annoying than coding that onboarding screen must have been.
2. Refresh page for the next 15 years until birth date is valid
Rsync + a bash script is horrible to get going in a mobile device. (What is the fault of the mobile OSes, and if you can get by with a less hostile one, great for you.) Those open-core ones put some work on it.
Taking a picture with my phone and having it show up on my computer in 5 seconds is pretty close to magic in terms of file sharing.
Completely free, andno central server to introduce "age verification" or whatever.
i created an account when i was 16 or something, but never used it before 18
after age verification they suspended my account, but allowed to move funds to a new account with other e-mail address
I found old save games still shared via Dropbox or Google docs that work 7-8 years later.
The combinations I see in other comments are not going to survive that long.
It's like comparing `scp` to something like `sshfs` mounted to a shared folder, and having an algorithm to handle file conflicts.
I'm a heavy syncthing user, but still do rsync to deploy changes to my personal VPS because I don't need any of that.
