I'm sure it didn't hurt them but their execution to date has been impeccable.
One thing has popped up recently: Dropbox relies on the urls to folders in 'boxes' that are shared to remain secret, nothing stops google from indexing the contents once the ___location is known, there is no 'robots.txt' that instructs google not to peek there.
This could lead to a lot of people being highly surprised that the contents of their secret stash are suddenly open to the portion of the population that uses google.
The problem is that it's not just the users that nominally own the data that control this, basically everybody that you share that url with can 'leak' it to google, either by using a toolbar or by posting it on some webpage. After that it's fair game.
One thing has popped up recently: Dropbox relies on the urls to folders in 'boxes' that are shared to remain secret, nothing stops google from indexing the contents once the ___location is known, there is no 'robots.txt' that instructs google not to peek there.
This could lead to a lot of people being highly surprised that the contents of their secret stash are suddenly open to the portion of the population that uses google.
The problem is that it's not just the users that nominally own the data that control this, basically everybody that you share that url with can 'leak' it to google, either by using a toolbar or by posting it on some webpage. After that it's fair game.
To see this for yourself:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=a+site...
According to dropbox support this is by design, but I can still see how some people might be very surprised by this.
edited for clarity, thanks thomaswmeyer.