Dropbox's Jan 1st 2027 terms of service
simonebrunozzi
61 points
107 comments
September 20, 2026
Related Discussions
Found 5 related stories in 82.4ms across 7,193 title embeddings via pgvector HNSW
- Dropbox Data Breach hmate9 · 24 pts · August 31, 2026 · 63% similar
- Dropbox Got Hacked yonilevy · 34 pts · August 31, 2026 · 55% similar
- Dropbox is an obvious PE Target? Taikhoom10 · 25 pts · August 12, 2026 · 47% similar
- Changes to Sourcehut's terms of service regarding LLMs progval · 86 pts · August 27, 2026 · 44% similar
- Delete Your Data with Drop mooreds · 18 pts · July 20, 2026 · 44% similar
Discussion Highlights (19 comments)
webprofusion
Diff or it didn't happen
haunter
Diffchecker for the save https://www.diffchecker.com/QD8AKShC/
rlk
Looks like the major changes are: - some stuff about Teams that's mostly only relevant if you're using your work email for a personal account - minimium age 13 -> 18; add "Dropbox may use and rely on information from third parties, including age signals from app stores, for the purpose of enforcing this restriction." - free accounts may be terminated after 6 months of no use (previously 12 months) - removed "If you reside in the EU, the European Commission provides for an online dispute resolution platform, which you can access here: https://ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr ." from the dispute resolution process.
big85
Major changes: 1. You must be 18 to use Dropbox. Previously, you had to be 13 if in the United States, or 16 if higher. Dropbox may use information "Dropbox may use and rely on information from third parties, including age signals from app stores, for the purpose of enforcing this restriction." 2. Your account may be terminated if you don't have a Paid account and haven't accessed for 6 months. Previously, it was 12 months. 3. If you have multiple accounts tied to the same email address, and one is banned, the others may also be banned. 4. "Refunds are only issued if required by law." -> "Refunds are only issued in limited circumstances or if required by law." 5. You automatically agree to the new terms if you continue to have an account. Previously, it was only if you continued to use the service. 6. Some terms covering Teams accounts.
drgo
I switched to Sync last year. Much cheaper, better quality.
zdc1
This person has over 1000 submissions. Going for the quantity-first approach I guess... Edit: following up my less productive comment with a productive one: this ToS update was crowd-sourced diff treasure-hunt with, at the end, no treasure to be found. These ToS changes are really quite unremarkable. I wonder which change of terms OP decided were interesting enough to post about.
hjkl0
What’s a good Dropbox alternative? Especially for Macs. Feels like they spent twenty years just making the Mac client worse.
swiftcoder
I guess teenagers don't have any need to sync files, eh? Hate to see this gradual erosion of internet access for young people - I'd bet half the notable members of this very site started their career trajectory by learning how to break/fix computers in middle school or before
lukeify
Amazing Dropbox went from a brilliantly simple service to this stagnating corporate swamp of ooze. Yet another fascinating example of how headcount correlates with quality decline.
ak39
Why hasn't anyone created a windows and mac client that git pushes changes to remote after file activities of local computer, and polls remote repo every 1 minute for changes to pull? I'd gladly pay for that. :-)
kristianc
Dropbox will be one of the next Bending Spoons acquisitions. Low growth, none of the upsell or product extension things they've done have really worked out, and no-one's idea of what the future looks like.
duttish
I've been a happy customer of Tresorit for several years now. Give them a try if you're fed up with Dropbox. At first I was selective in what folders I synced but after a few months I decided to just sync my entire workspace folder with everything in it. Incredibly convenient, everything is automatically synced between my desktop and laptop. If you go this route look into filters, it's not a very advertised feature but works great for excluding build output, venvs and other stuff.
sorbusherra
i'm so happy with syncthing project.
Lukas_Skywalker
If the enshittification continues, it might be time to go back to rsync [0]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
pveierland
Funny that this is the only Dropbox post I've seen on HN besides infamous references to their launch post. You'd think there would be plenty of interesting improvements to make. Having been a paid user for the last decade my current experience is just getting error messages on my phone every week that something failed to sync, and that I have to re-enter the app every ~month to disable/enable syncing for my offline files, otherwise it doesn't work. I can't remember any time I've been pleasantly surprised by any change to the service.
loehnsberg
This leaves a lot of questions. Why are they raising the age limit? What legislation demands this? Will other services follow? And what if parents give consent? Are users on a family plan now forced to kick off their kids from the joined plan?
elnerd
Does this mean that young adults that work for companies that use Dropbox, cannot collaborate with others using Dropbox?
kotaKat
Not the first time Dropbox bros kicked kids off a platform. Mission SF Soccer remembers.
Paianni
TBH, I'm happy because there's an old account I'm unable to access (email address was closed, recovery didn't work) that still has content I would prefer not to be public anymore. The sooner it can vanish the better.