What is a "sensibly labeled checkbox"?

    [x] Enable Smart Sync
    [x] Install Dropbox drivers required for Smart Sync

What happens if I uncheck the second checkbox but not the first? Does Smart Sync just sit there and look sad?

Maybe just a note under the Smart Sync thing saying "Smart Sync drivers are installed. Disable Smart Sync to remove"? Will that actually make anyone happier?

Also—Dropbox is a filesystem. (Logically, the entire product is a filesystem; pedantically, traditional Dropbox might not be but Smart Sync definitely fits the definition of a network filesystem.) Traditionally on UNIX, if you're installing a third-party filesystem like AFS or Lustre or ZFS or whatever else, you're installing drivers. The fact that installing a filesystem installs both userspace software and drivers doesn't feel weird to me at all.

> What happens if I uncheck the second checkbox but not the first? Does Smart Sync just sit there and look sad?

Is this a serious question? I've seen dozens if not hundreds of UI's that gray out a checkbox (either with or without the box checked) once you click a different one. Obviously this might not be an optimal solution for this specific dialog, but you could easily do something like:

[x] Enable Smart Sync (NOTE: This requires installing a driver onto your computer)

This is actually what the opt-in looks like for Smart Sync (except at an admin level since team admins opt their users into it). There's also an individual opt-out if your team admin has opted you in and you don't want things enabled.

Traditional UNIX filesystems didn't backdoor the accessibility panel for persistence.

Well, where the analogy falls down a bit is that traditional UNIX filesystems have traditionally been installed and maintained by UNIX systems administrators.

My point wasn't to blindly defend everything Dropbox has done. I'm sure they've made mistakes, both in design and implementation. My point was that things like their hack of the accessibility panel are, in my opinion, overblown by the average technical reader.

I think bothering the user with an accessibility panel is tedious "Charlie work" that I'd prefer be avoided. I understand why it works the way it does, and I understand the theoretical risk the OS is trying to mitigate. But I'm already trusting Dropbox with my data. It's silly for the OS to treat them like some unknown piece of malware, it's just that the OS isn't a generally intelligent agent able to make accurate determinations of that sort.

I get all that. It doesn't change the fact that I as the user of my computer just want Dropbox to do whatever it needs to do to work. I'm capable of doing the accessibility dance that most applications require, but not everyone is, and I think it's a reasonable position for Dropbox to take that if users are signing up and downloading our app, then implicitly they trust us to check the accessibility box. Is that an objectively acceptable argument? No, but all I'm arguing is that it's reasonable. It doesn't imply maliciousness that that's the argument that won the day inside Dropbox.

I think at least some people object more to the less than forthright disclosure of what they're doing than the technical tricks. If they had a blog post "behind the scenes at dropbox kext headquarters" that'd be fine. It's the coverup, not the crime.

You mean like https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/05/going-deeper-with-pro...

Yeah, something like that would be pretty good. :)

I'm not sure that's true, actually. The ways that AFS hooks into the kernel, especially on kernels that don't have actual loadable module support (older commercial UNIXes) or on kernels that try to limit syscall hooking (e.g., Linux), are distressingly close to the ways that a rootkit hooks into the kernel.