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If you can work on stuff locally, and encrypt it before saving to the sky, the Dropbox (or other) people can't mine your work and content, nor can their automated processes.
But if you are WORKING in the cloud and then also save it there, Google is already in possession of the plain text and has cataloged and indexed it, up, down, sideways, and backwards, and you will be seeing ads vaguely related to it for the next few weeks.
-----Original Message-----
From: Phil
Sent: April-21-13 12:37 AM
To: techwrl
Subject: Re: Google Drive or Dropbox for document sharing?
I also use both for different purposes.
I use Dropbox as a live, synchronous backup to the active directories
(folders) on my Mac. I also use the shared Dropbox folders for regular clients, and that works great. Worth noting that the Db website has a 'versions' feature (rather like Apple's Time Machine) which means that you can recover or restore any file through the website should it get deleted locally or you want to go back to an earlier version. This does not impact on your allotted free space total either, which is nice.
I don't really use the Google Drive as such, but its installed by default because I use Google Docs for teaching. I only ever access the .gdocs through the website, and indeed as far as I can tell, you can't open .gdocs locally anyway. Google docs is a really great feature for any collaborative online work, but the Drive doesn't have the same seamless integration that Dropbox has for me.
On a personal note, I also try to minimise my use of any Google products wherever I can (i.e., I will often choose an alternative if one is available that's equally as good/convenient) because I don't like the way Google tries to accumulate, consolidate and data mine information about my entire life.
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