Company

Transparency report for the first half of 2016

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Published on December 12, 2016

Hundreds of millions of people trust Dropbox to keep their data private and secure. One way we work to earn that trust is through our commitment to transparency about government requests for user information. Since 2012, we’ve made these requests public in our Transparency Report. Today we’re publishing the details of the government data requests we’ve received from January through June of 2016. We handle each request for user information according to our data request principles: be transparent, fight overly broad requests, provide trusted services, and protect all users. We recently updated these principles and encourage you to take a look at them once again. We believe that Dropbox users have a right to know when governments request their information and that we have a right to notify them of those requests. Along with many of these requests, however, we also receive court-granted indefinite non-disclosure orders. These orders prohibit us from ever notifying individual users that the government sought their information, and so we’ve chosen to start sharing the aggregate number of these non-disclosure orders in our Transparency Report. For clarity, we’ve broken down the number of indefinite non-disclosure court orders for each type of data request we received. Less than 0.0002% of Dropbox users are affected by law enforcement requests for information. Still, we don’t view these requests as trivial. Dropbox has also joined a coalition of tech companies using legal avenues to fight for a more thoughtful balance between the legitimate interests of law enforcement and the privacy of our users. We value the confidence you’ve put in us and take the responsibility of protecting your information seriously. Our principles will continue to govern how we respond to all government requests for user information and how we work to earn your trust. To see the full report click here.