Dropbox is one of the most popular cloud-based services for storing any file you might want to have available across several platforms and accessible at all times. At the same time, this service offers less storage capacity than some of its rivals, users who decide to use the free scheme get 2GB with some options to upgrade this capacity for free by inviting more users to join giving an extra 500MB for each user that subscribes, earning as much as 16 GB. There are also some bonuses when using the mobile app, but aside from that, users should pay in case they need more space.
While the advantages of having your files in the cloud are evident, some concerns about security must be considered even though these are very rare case scenarios, they include government intrusion, cyber attacks or simply some error in their data centers that might end up erasing some files. Patrick Heim, head of trust and security of the company addressed some of this security-related concerns on a recent event that took place in London. Heim is confident that Dropbox is secure enough and has responded to cyber attacks in an adequate way, he explained that some files might even be safer in the cloud than in a physical hard-drive as these files wouldn’t be susceptible to malware. He’s mostly concerned about the passwords users choose, not only might they be very weak but they might use their Dropbox password to log into several accounts, so if one of the other sites gets attacked, they might use the stolen password to access their cloud-stored files.
The company wants to make sure that the users feel like they really care about them and their security, so they want the two-factor authentication implemented since 2012 and offering an extra level of security, to be implemented in most of the accounts, but most users don’t know enough to care about activating this procedure. It consists of authenticating users by more than just their username and their password, requiring them to verify their identity with their fingerprint, their voice or their mobile phone number. What the company is planning to do to incentivize their users to improve their security is to offer a little more storage space for free, although they didn’t discuss the amount of the extra space and when might this launch, but the amount of free space should be enough to entice their users as they would not bother to activate it for a few megabytes. Google Drive did this and offered 2 GB of extra space, but the offer was valid only for a limited time.