As this summary stated in its original version, "Dropbox gave us access to project-folder related data, which we aggregated and anonymized." The result was a storm of protest. The story has since been rewritten to say Dropbox anonymized the data before handing it over to researchers. "We designed the study to fall within the scope of our Privacy Policy," said Dropbox in its own report. Julia Poncela-Casasnovas, the author who did most of the work (but is not in the HBR byline) said in an interview, "none of us at Northwestern ever saw the non-anonymized Dropbox data." From where I sit, the real story here is marketing staff at Dropbox using connections at HBR to pump up the readership of a research paper about - and authored with - Dropbox. Considerations like research ethics came a distant second, and this is reflected in the way the HBR article was first drafted.
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