Was Dropbox Really Hacked?

Dropbox suffered a major outage over the weekend.

In one of the more bizarre recent incidents, after the service went down on Friday evening a group of hackers claimed to have infiltrated the service and compromised its servers.

However, on the Dropbox blog, Dropbox VP of engineering Ardita Ardwarl told users that hackers were not to blame.

Ardwari said, “On Friday evening we began a routine server upgrade. Unfortunately, a bug installed this upgrade on several active servers, which brought down the entire service. Your files were always safe, and despite some reports, no hacking or DDOS attack was involved.”

The fault occurred when a bug in an upgrade script caused an operating system upgrade to be triggered on several live machines, rendering them inoperative. Although the fault was rectified in three hours, the knock-on effects led to problems that lasted through the weekend for some users.

Dropbox has assured users that there are no further problems and that all users should now be back online. It said that at no point were files in danger, adding that the affected machines didn’t host any user data. In other words, the “hackers” weren’t hackers at all, but attention seeking trolls.

Dropbox claims to have over 200 million users, many of which it has acquired through strategic partnerships with device manufacturers offering free storage with purchases.

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The company is looking forward to an initial public offering (IPO) on the stock market, so the timing of such a major outage could not be worse. Dropbox, which includes Bono and The Edge from U2 amongst its investors, has recently enhanced its business offering to appeal to enterprise clients, and such a loss of uptime could affect its ability to attract customers.

Europe Investigating Google’s Privacy Policy

France’s data protection watchdog is questioning the legality and fairness of Google’s new privacy policy, which it said breached European laws.

The CNIL regulator told Google in a letter dated February 27 it would lead a European-wide investigation of the web search giant’s latest policy and would send it questions by mid-March.

Google said in January it was simplifying its privacy policy, consolidating 60 guidelines into a single one that will apply for all its services, including YouTube, Gmail and its social network Google+.

The U.S. Internet company also said it will pool data it collects on individual users across its services, allowing it to better tailor search results and improve service.

Users cannot opt out of the new policy if they want to continue using Google’s services.

“The CNIL and EU data authorities are deeply concerned about the combination of personal data across services: they have strong doubts about the lawfulness and fairness of such processing, and its compliance with European data protection legislation,” the French regulator wrote to Google.

Google plans to put the changes into effect March 1 and has rebuffed two requests from European regulators for a delay.

The tussle over data privacy comes at a delicate time for Google, whose business model is based on giving away free search, email, and other services while making money by selling user-targeted advertising.

It is already being investigated by the EU’s competition authority and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over how it ranks search results and whether it favors its own products over rival services.

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Big Boys Sign Consumer Privacy Pact

Six of the world’s top consumer technology companies have agreed to provide greater privacy disclosures before customers download applications in order to protect the personal data of millions of consumers, California’s attorney general said on Wednesday.

The agreement binds Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Research In Motion, and Hewlett-Packard — and developers on their platforms — to disclose how they use private data before an app may be downloaded, Attorney General Kamala D. Harris said.

“Your personal privacy should not be the cost of using mobile apps, but all too often it is,” said Harris.

Currently 22 of the 30 most downloaded apps do not have privacy notices, said Harris. Some downloaded apps also download a consumer’s contact book.

Google said in a statement that under the California agreement, Android users will have “even more ways to make informed decisions when it comes to their privacy.”

Apple confirmed the agreement but did not elaborate.

Harris was also among U.S. state lawmakers who on Wednesday signed a letter to Google CEO Larry Page to express “serious concerns” over the web giant’s recent decision to consolidate its privacy policy.

The policy change would give Google access to user information across its products, such as GMail and Google Plus, without the proper ability for consumers to opt out, said the 36 U.S. attorneys general in their letter.

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