Dropbox’s Finder Toolbar
Seth Vargo (via Hacker News):
You would think less than a month after a very popular HackerNews article on how Dropbox Hacks Your Mac, the file sharing company would be careful about the activities they are performing in their software distribution. Nope, not Dropbox. Today they released an update that adds a hacky overlay UI element to finder that cannot be disabled!
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Aside from the fact that this banner looks like something free software would install as a toolbar, it has some serious UX issues. I question if Dropbox actually tested this thing.
Hi folks, Ben from Dropbox on the desktop client team --
This is an experiment that is being tested with a fraction of users primarily on beta releases (which Seth is on, as evidenced by the version number in his screenshots). We haven’t shipped it to everyone so that we can continue to iterate and incorporate feedback. I checked with the team about the “Finder Toolbar” drop down and it looks like it requires a restart of the Dropbox client in order to take affect — let us know if that doesn’t work.
Vargo said that didn’t work.
Dropbox still refuses to answer why their client takes up a ton of CPU anytime there is IO on the system. It seems like they are monitoring ALL filesystem activity, not just the Dropbox folder. What they are doing with that data I have no idea.
I have quit Dropbox before expanding a new Xcode archive because otherwise it overwhelms the CPU monitoring all the new files, which are not in my Dropbox folder.
Previously: Dropbox Modifies TCC.db to Give Itself Accessibility Access.
