Is Apple blanket-rejecting iOS apps that make use of Dropbox because of an evil plan to push developers toward iCloud? If you asked this question five days ago, the answer from the Internet at large might have been a resounding "yes!" But days later, as is often the case, details have come out that reveal the answer is probably "no."</p><p>

As it turns out, Dropbox inadvertently put other developers using its SDK in violation of one of Apple's app guidelines, resulting in a string of rejections that looked as if apps using Dropbox were being banned. The Web flew into a fury over what is essentially an annoying but long-standing clause in Apple's guidelines. The problem has now been remedied and the fury has died down.

The problem was that Dropbox wasn't letting apps where people could click through to buy Dropbox storage externally the option of buying the same storage inside the app. Guidelines, eh.

Tickboxes galore. Man, Microsoft sure does love those tickboxes. It's like the specification inspector. What's not mentioned is that you don't have to use one or the other. You can have them all.

Not looking good for Dropbox: "I've spent a bunch of time talking to entrepreneurs who are building companies in and around the cloud storage space. It's not a space I like very much because I don't think we'll be using files in the cloud. Now Dropbox is a brilliant company and an amazing service and they are doing very well, but will we need a service like Dropbox when everything is in the cloud? I don't think so."

"We’ve never been interested in rights broader than what we need to run Dropbox. We want to get this language right so that you’re comfortable using Dropbox with no reservations: what’s yours is yours. Instead of trying to add clarifications to the terms, we’ve rewritten this part from scratch..."<br />
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Suitable for those concerned about it?

"Now I don't think the Dropbox guys are evil or that they're trying to steal your content.  I'm sure they're perfectly nice guys just trying to provide a useful service. And it *IS* a useful service.  I wouldn't hesitate to use Dropbox for any non-confidential data/documents that I needed to sync to multiple devices. Just as I wouldn't hesitate to use the free Google Docs to coordinate a family reunion or maintain the stats for a little league baseball team.<br />
"But when it comes to confidential data, ESPECIALLY confidential data that belongs to clients or customers - data that, if leaked publicly, could do some real harm to my clients or customers...there is no way I'm going to willingly upload it to a service that acknowledges that their staffers (none of whom I've ever met) and the unspecified people and companies they work with can access (or even "monitor") that data. Not going to happen."<br />
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Note: you can encrypt before you upload. Then they can't read it.

"The previous section should clarify our commitment to user privacy. That said, there have been a lot of questions raised about government data requests.<br />
"Just so you know, we don’t get very many of those requests — about one a month over the past year for our more than 25 million users. That’s fewer than one in a million accounts.<br />
"That said, like all U.S. companies, we must follow U.S. law...When we get a government request, we don’t just hand over your information or files. Our legal team vets all of these requests before we take any action. The small number of requests we have received have all been targeted to specific individuals under criminal investigation. If we were to receive a government request that was too broad or didn’t comply with the law, we would stand up for our users and fight for their privacy rights."