How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac
Hi HN — Ben from Dropbox here on the desktop client team. Wanted to clarify a few things —<p>- Clearly we need to do a better job communicating about Dropbox’s OS integration. We ask for permissions once but don’t describe what we’re doing or why. We’ll fix that.<p>- We only ask for privileges we actively use -- but unfortunately some of the permissions aren’t as granular as we would like.<p>- We use accessibility APIs for the Dropbox badge (Office integrations) and other integrations (finding windows &amp; other UI interactions).<p>- We use elevated access for where the built-in FS APIs come up short. We&#x27;ve been working with Apple to eliminate this dependency and we should have what we need soon.<p>- We never see or store your admin password. The dialog box you see is a native OS X API (i.e. made by Apple).<p>- We check and set privileges on startup — the intent was to make sure Dropbox is functioning properly, works across OS updates, etc. The intent was never to frustrate people or override their choices.<p>We’re all jumping on this. We’ll do a better job here and we’re sorry for any anger, frustration or confusion we’ve caused.