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.
This has made me wonder at times if the best way to get my data delete from someplace is to talk to customer service and repeatedly say that I'm twelve.
Also, his class had a WhatsApp group chat in which school info was shared. This was kind of weird because it meant that all 12 year olds in the group must have cheated their dates of birth, because otherwise they could not have had a WhatsApp account
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/complying-co...
>If you choose to block children under 13 on your general audience site or service, you should take care to design your age screen in a manner that does not encourage children to falsify their ages to gain access to your site or service. Ask age information in a neutral manner at the point at which you invite visitors to provide personal information or to create a user ID.
>In designing a neutral age-screening mechanism, you should consider:
>Making sure the data entry point allows users to enter their age accurately. An example of a neutral age-screen would be a system that allows a user freely to enter month and year of birth. A site that includes a drop-down menu that only permits users to enter birth years making them 13 or older would not be considered a neutral age-screening mechanism since children cannot enter their correct ages on that site.
>Avoiding encouraging children to falsify their age information, for example, by stating that visitors under 13 cannot participate or should ask their parents before participating. In addition, simply including a check box stating, “I am over 12 years old” would not be considered a neutral age-screening mechanism.
I'm never going back. Way better in every aspect than Dropbox.
NextCloud also sells a device with it preinstalled and easy to use
Dropbox at least has some resiliency distributed across multiple servers.
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.
So your friend is in the market to buy a house and tells you about an issue with a particular realtor they are having, and you say...
"I got a great alternative, you can buy a piece of land, rezone it, get permits, go chop down your own wood, build your own house with your bare hands..."
They say to you, I hate my realtor... I don't hate my job. What you're suggesting as an alternative is more like saying that building your own car is an alternative to buying one. They aren't in the same league, and so while it makes sense for people to resell or offer Nextcloud as an option for self-hosted solutions or security, it makes no sense to try to say they are an alternative to Dropbox.
> 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.
The differences doesn't mean that I don't like it, in fact I self host a lot of my own solutions. I'm just saying they don't really compare or compete.
Sure, if you want to purchase an array of servers that are distributed across multiple regions and setup a Ceph cluster to distribute storage in a resilient manner then go ahead. By all means do it, but to act like that somehow compares to purchasing a service that already does this is just misleading. After that person spends tens of thousands of dollars to replicate what Dropbox does, then they can finally have an alternative that they never thought of before paying $12/mo. for Dropbox.
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.
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.
My experience is that I can usually only go back to the 1930s.
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.
The inconvenience isn't important when it's an outlier event.
Does everyone bungle their Skype account profile 3 times a day or did it happen to one person out of millions and only one time in that person's life?
For outlier cases, any form of redress at all is ok. All that really matters is that there IS a procedure at all and it is doable (doesn't cost $1000 or require something impossible). Unlike say getting your google/gmail account fixed when there is no such thing as a google customer support # you can call to fix things that the automated processes got wrong.
The only problem I see is the discrepency between creating and updating.
If there is a valid reason to require proof of age to update an account from child to adult, then by rights exactly that same proof should be required to create the account in the first place.
then the convenience matters, and there should be some more practical way to supply something which is legally accepted as good enough, and that should be the same for both creation and update.
I don't think we really have that "something", especially not globally and absolutely positively not anonymously. By now, in most countries there is probably some form of standard ID that most people in the country either have or can get. But they are different for every country and definitely creates a first world discrimination filter.
Thinking about that, it seems like the whole idea is misguided and imvalid, unworkable. How would one do it? Even in a 1st world country and me having both a SSN and a drivers ID and or government ID, it still leaves the problem of anonymity and multiple/temp accounts etc, and still leaves the problem that I entered the wrong number which means probably someone ele's number, which means someone else could enter mine...so there needs to be a mechanism to prove that I own the number I entered, which there is no such mechanism. Maybe if ID#'s were really key pairs and you never simply entered a number but instead signed something or proved that you could decrypt something signed, but that is a high tech fantasy world we aren't quite in yet.
Kids should be protected from those who would exploit them, but requiring proof of age to use on-line services isn't a functioning way to do it.
Fair enough, but I’m not sure Microsoft could be described as a ‘random company’
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.
Sc is very, very cool but you must sync both ways every time, so after some time, if your phone runs out of space, things get hard. The "do not erase on 'server'" setting is pretty well hidden and claimed not to be supported and can break things.
Also, for "one way sync", with super easy setup, i have not found an alternative for btsync (now called resilio). SC is too clunky to set up the client and in this case, running Nextcloud server + setting up clients is crazy complex. TIL about Unison and will try it out...
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'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.
I think most people that commented in that thread were able to spot the cyanide dissolving into the drink
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
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
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
