> On the other hand, keeping copies of the user's data after you say you've deleted it doesn't sound too ethical to me. I don't expect immediate purging, but I also don't expect potentially sensitive files to linger for months after they were supposed to be deleted.
This is a fair concern, but I think the issue of recovering files is much more important than the issue of retention of deleted files to the huge majority of the Dropbox user base. I imagine most privacy-conscious users would use an online sync service that offers encryption by default, etc.
Also because Dropbox's EULA almost certainly has a provision that deleting files doesn't necessarily mean Dropbox erases the data right away, just that they won't make it available for recovery and it might be deleted at some future point.
They say "there might be some latency in deleting this information from our servers and back-up storage". But as a user, I expect this to be a reasonable period of a couple of weeks, not months.
This is a fair concern, but I think the issue of recovering files is much more important than the issue of retention of deleted files to the huge majority of the Dropbox user base. I imagine most privacy-conscious users would use an online sync service that offers encryption by default, etc.