How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac
Hi HN — Ben from Dropbox here on the desktop client team. Wanted to clarify a few things —- 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.- We only ask for privileges we actively use -- but unfortunately some of the permissions aren’t as granular as we would like.- We use accessibility APIs for the Dropbox badge (Office integrations) and other integrations (finding windows & other UI interactions).- We use elevated access for where the built-in FS APIs come up short. We've been working with Apple to eliminate this dependency and we should have what we need soon.- We never see or store your admin password. The dialog box you see is a native OS X API (i.e. made by Apple).- 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.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.