His team sent Dropbox citation information from the Web of Science-an index that ranks researchers according to how often their work is cited-which Dropbox then paired with folder data, anonymized and aggregated, and sent back for analysis.Įven if the personal names are removed, folder titles and file structures can potentially be used to identify individuals, according to Colorado University Boulder professor Casey Fiesler, who teaches in the Department of Information Science. "In addition, our research partners at NICO are bound by strict confidentiality obligations." Northwestern's Pah supported that statement, telling WIRED that he and his team were never able to see any personal information or the content of any Dropbox folders or files. "Before sharing the activity data with NICO, we randomized or hashed the dataset and grouped it into wide ranges to further ensure that no identifying information could be derived," Dropbox elaborated. But while Dropbox's more than half a billion users can rest easy that their de-anonymized data isn't readily shared with researchers, the only consent Dropbox obtained from customers involved in the study was their agreement to its privacy policy and terms of service, according to representatives for Dropbox. “Before providing any Dropbox users’ data to the researchers, Dropbox permanently anonymized the data by rendering any identifying user information unreadable, including individual emails and shared folder IDs," a Dropbox spokesperson told WIRED. One sentence in particular caught readers' attention: “Dropbox gave us access to project-folder-related data, which we aggregated and anonymized, for all the scientists using its platform over the period from May 2015 to May 2017-a group that represented 1,000 universities." Written by Northwestern University Institute on Complex Systems professors Adam Pah and Brian Uzzi and Dropbox Manager of Enterprise Insights Rebecca Hinds, that wording suggested Dropbox had handed over personally identifiable information on hundreds of thousands of customers.īy Tuesday, Harvard Business Review had corrected that part of the article to say the data was anonymized and aggregated prior to being given to the researchers. The study quickly attracted the notice of academics-but not for the reason Dropbox and the researchers had hoped.
And on Friday, they published their results in an article for the Harvard Business Review. Looking at data about academics' folder-sharing habits, they found the most successful scientists share some collaboration behaviors in common.
For the past two years, researchers at Northwestern University have been analyzing the habits of tens of thousands of scientists-using Dropbox.
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