Amid the shiny, happy announcements of new features and new apps this week, file-sharing startup Dropbox quietly revealed another piece of news. Condoleezza Rice -- Stanford professor, Iraq War architect, alleged warrantless wiretap supporter -- is joining the board at the rising tech startup.
Dropbox CEO Drew Houston didn't mention the appointment during his keynote at a press event on Wednesday, but a day later, Rice's arrival had eclipsed the rest of the company's carefully crafted public event. Unsurprisingly, some people aren't too happy about the move. Over on Hacker News, a leading barometer for what's on the minds of tech geeks, the day's most popular link connects to DropDropbox, a new site calling on users to boycott the company unless it removes Rice.
The campaign's apparently anonymous creators are calling for her removal in part because of her support for the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program, including claims that Rice herself authorized eavesdropping on UN Security Council members. "Why on earth would we want someone like her involved with Dropbox, an organization we are trusting with our most important business and personal data?" the site asks.
>'What Dropbox and its many competitors are ultimately selling is trust -- after all, you're giving them your data -- and public relations are a big part of winning your business.'
It's easy to dismiss opposition to Rice as partisan politics, as Drop Dropbox's creators acknowledge. And Rice's presence on the board is hardly the same thing as giving the NSA a spare key to your servers. Dropbox has previously been aggressive in promising to fight broad government requests for data and access to users' files, pledges the company has codified into its "Government Data Requests Principles."
Nevertheless, in the competitive world of cloud computing and storage, appearances matter a lot. Services for storing data and files online abound. What Dropbox and its many competitors are ultimately selling is trust -- after all, you're giving them your data -- and public relations are a big part of winning your business. Customers aren't just buying gigabytes. They're buying into a brand. Especially in the post-Edward Snowden era where fears of online government surveillance have turned out to be anything but paranoid, Dropbox's decision to join with someone so closely tied to the national security apparatus carries a big risk to the company's image.
We would assume that Dropbox realized this. And at least after the fact, the company argues that Rice is more of an asset than a hinderance to the company. "When looking to grow our board, we sought out a leader who could help us expand our global footprint," Houston wrote on Dropbox's blog. "Dr. Rice has had an illustrious career as Provost of Stanford University, board member of companies like Hewlett Packard and Charles Schwab, and former United States Secretary of State. We’re honored to be adding someone as brilliant and accomplished as Dr. Rice to our team."
But this shows that Dropbox -- which now reached 275 million people -- has entered a world where not just its tech but its attitudes have an enormous impact on whether people see its service as secure. As it butts head with Google and Facebook, Dropbox has long since graduated from its cute, cuddly startup phase. It's a serious business with nearly 700 workers and ambitions to become as pervasive in the world as the internet's biggest properties. And it has to be careful.
Dropbox seems to have calculated that gaining Rice as an ally was worth the risk of controversy. On the one hand, some Dropbox users might not like the Rice. But, on the other, they probably like the idea of taking the time to transfer 100GB of photos and files to another service even less. Odds are, most people will stay, if only out of inertia. But maintaining trust is a delicate process: just one big mistake can make it all disappear.
