On Wednesday, news surfaced about a new pre-set setting for Dropbox, according to which the service shares data with OpenAI for an experimental AI search feature. However, Dropbox says that data is only shared if the feature is actively used. The company also says that user data shared with third-party AI partners is not used to train AI models and is deleted within 30 days.
Even with the reassurances about data privacy, the discovery that the setting had been enabled by default annoyed some Dropbox users. On Wednesday afternoon, Drew Houston, the company’s CEO, apologized for the confusion and in a post on X and wrote:
“The third-party AI toggle in the settings menu enables or disables access to DBX AI features and capabilities. Neither this nor any other setting automatically or passively sends any Dropbox customer data to a third-party AI service.”
Critics are not entirely satisfied and argue that communication about the change could have been clearer. In July, the company announced an AI extension called Dash that allows AI models to perform universal searches across platforms like Google Workspace and Microsoft Outlook.
According to Dropbox’s privacy FAQs, third-party AI opt-out options are part of the “Dropbox AI alpha,” which is a conversational interface for exploring file contents involving a chat with a ChatGPT-style bot. According to the FAQ, the third-party AI toggle is turned on by default if you participate in Dropbox’s AI alpha. Currently, it must be said that the only provider of third-party AI technologies for Dropbox is OpenAI.
Disabling the feature is easy in case you prefer not to share data or don’t want to use Dropbox’s AI features. Simply log in to your Dropbox account on a desktop web browser, click on your profile photo, > Settings > third-party AI. At which point you need to click the toggle next to “Use artificial intelligence (AI) from third-party partners to work faster in Dropbox” to set it to the “off” position.
