The right way to stop Dropbox from sharing your personal files with OpenAI

If you happen to’ve used any of Dropbox‘s artificial intelligence tools, a few of your documents and files could have been shared with OpenAI.

There’s a legitimate business reason the corporate is working with OpenAI: Dropbox doesn’t have its own chatbot, so to offer chatbot services comparable to summarizing or answering questions on your files, it must send that information to a 3rd party, after which pass along the third-party chatbot’s response to you.

Nevertheless, there should be cause for customer concern.

Dropbox AI customer documents go through and are stored on OpenAI’s servers for as much as 30 days. The “third-party AI” toggle is turned on by default in account settings, in line with Dropbox’s FAQs, published in October, so it’s good to turn it off for those who don’t need your files going to OpenAI while you use those features.

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston clarified in a thread on X (formerly Twitter) that this data-sharing happens only when users actively engage with the AI features.

“Third-party AI services are only used when customers actively engage with Dropbox AI features which themselves are clearly labeled,” he wrote, pointing to a screenshot.

A spokesperson also added that “customer data isn’t used to coach or fine-tune OpenAI’s language models.” 

The news follows a barrage of public discussion and concern over user privacy amid the uptick in use of consumer-facing AI models, comparable to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Anthropic’s Claude, not to say corporations’ proprietary AI models. In August, Zoom modified its terms of service after it got here under fire for allowing its AI models to coach on some customer data.

Dropbox’s third-party AI data sharing only applies to users who want Dropbox’s AI features, which is on the market through a lot of Dropbox’s paid plans, or through its Early Access program. In line with Dropbox, “only the content relevant to an explicit request or command is distributed to our third-party AI partners.”

But, even for those who’ve opted out, any files shared with one other one that is using Dropbox AI could still be sent to OpenAI servers.

In a single a part of the FAQs, Dropbox writes that for OpenAI, customer data “is rarely used to coach their internal models,” but in one other section, the corporate writes that it “won’t let our third-party partners train their models on our user data without consent.”

Here’s the right way to turn off use of third-party AI in your Dropbox settings if you have got data you do not need to be sent anywhere outside of Dropbox:

1. Log into Dropbox.
2. Click your account icon within the upper right corner.
3. Click Settings.
4. Select the Third-Party AI tab.
5. Toggle the switch to “off.”

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