Dropbox acquires Boxcryptor. What will happen to all those files that have been encrypted?

[riccardo1981]

Hi

As most will know, dropbox has purchased boxcryptor.
At this point my question is, what will happen to all those files that have been encrypted with boxcryptor ? Should they all be decrypted and wait for communication on how the transaction will be handled by Dropbox ?
Boxcryptor was used to encrypt files using other cloud services, will this change ?

Thank you very much
Riccardo

[apfund]

Hi @whausername, 

Indeed, our current plan is to offer our end-to-end encryption solution to our business team's customers. I completely recognize the importance of this solution for individual business users as well, and I'll ensure your input is taken into consideration internally.

Thank you, 

Andrea

[apfund]

Hi, 

I wanted to let you know that we have launched our end-to-end encryption today. More details can be found here and here. 
High level overview: 
You can now add end-to-end encryption to team folders. The functionality is available for our Advanced, Business Plus and Enterprise customers at no additional costs. 

Thank you, 
Andrea

[whausername]

Thanks for the update. What is Dropbox Advanced? It's mentioned everywhere but I can't find it on any pricing pages, I only see Essentials, Professional, Teams, Business, Business Plus, and Enterprise in various places on the website / in my account. I do hope the same functionality will become available in versions of Dropbox that do not require a team subscription because I don't need 3 accounts. There are plenty of lawyers, consultants, and other professionals who work solo or in smaller teams. I'm definitely not paying 3 times the price for 2 accounts I won't use.

Also... just now realized you are the Andrea who started Boxcryptor... face a bit red here. Boxcryptor was an absolutely awesome product and made my life so much easier. There are few things I miss when it comes to my digital life, but every time I work with a file (so, like, every hour of every day) I miss it. No disrespect for selling to Dropbox, I'm sure you worked your butts off for a decade and deserve a rest, but I'm genuinely sad that Boxcryptor is gone and Dropbox is going to make a mess of it. Hopefully someone else will build something to fill the void in the future. Best of luck to you once the golden handcuffs are removed.

[Martin R.19]

Dear Andrea,

I see two different overviews for available plans i.e. https://www.dropbox.com/plans and https://www.dropbox.com/business/plans-comparison I don't see any plan by the name "Advanced" as mentioned in your message. Furthermore the overviews or plan comparisons were obviously not yet updated as no plan shows the E2E encryption yet. 

So if I understood the content at the provided links correctly it's only specific (team) folders that have end-to-end encryption. What does team folder mean? Is it somehow related to Microsoft Teams or is it a folder that can be accessed by several users (if I want that)?

If I want all my files and directories getting encrypted in the Dropbox Cloud I would need to create a folder structure in that encrypted (team) folder?

Thanks for your efforts.

[Concerned Citizen]

This has been a long and active thread. I also have no ill feelings about Andrea selling Boxcryptor to Dropbox; it was a great product and you should deserve to benefit. But I happily paid $65/year to BC for six years preceding that and it was the best solution I could find for TNO encryption. I’m glad there has been movement on the product side but been the Teams restriction which I don’t understand and the Advanced product level which I don’t see, I’m still feeling confused. I hope we can clarify what is going on and hopefully the service is available again for just regular subscribers Family plan users like me.

[Cotswolds]

Advanced is on the storage/file sharing plans.

Storage (dropbox.com)

[Martin R.19]

Thank you! So they meanwhile have at least 3 different price overview pages. Quite confusing...

[apfund]

Thank you @whausername and @Concerned Citizen for your kind words regarding Boxcryptor!

We want to make sure that the end-to-end encryption in Dropbox is the even better alternative and will continue to work on it and improve it. 

Advanced: Yes, this is one of our (teams) plans. 

Encrypted Team Folder: This are folders created by the team admin of a Dropbox team which can be shared with members and groups of that team. And yes, if you want all of your Dropbox content to be end-to-end encrypted, you need to create an encrypted team folder at the top level and then add your subfolders below. 

Currently, end-to-end encryption is only available for the mentioned team plans. 

[Concerned Citizen]

We would like to request end-to-end encrypted folders availability in other paid tiers like Family:

Here is a rationale:

In previous Dropbox product offerings there was a strategy of offering premium features as incentive to upgrade to higher tiers of service, take Hello Sign for example.  But in this instance there is not a logical upgrade path from Family to Teams.  Our use cases are different.  My partner and children are not business colleagues.  In terms of our file security however our risk profile is every bit as important as a small company would be, so the encryption layer is very compelling for us.

So if Andrea or whoever has their ear on this thread from within DBX Corp, please consider the situation (a not uncommon one I would suspect) of paid monthly subscribers who want this feature but don't make sense to switch over to a Teams plan.

At least now the feature is in place it's not a technology issue but a business issue.  Which doesn't mean we'll get what we want any faster, but one problem down one to go. 🥳

[whausername]

My guess is someone high up in the enterprise sales team said "enterprise customers want E2EE". So then the higher-ups decided to buy Boxcryptor and integrate it, but nobody ever spoke to the engineers, they just spoke to a director of engineering or director of product. So the engineers get handed this other product which they basically need to cast aside and built E2EE into the Dropbox product more-or-less from scratch. There is no roadmap for offering E2EE to individuals or family users because Dropbox likes having access to their files. Who knows what agreements they've made with governments or law enforcement agencies.

None of their competitors offer E2EE to individuals so they won't bother. This is a giant company with very little agility. Try Cryptomator, Tresorit, Sync.com, pCloud, etc. if you're looking for E2EE for a single account. Never gonna see it happen here.