Since you seem to be talking about having their systems touch any bytes of the file, I have a more important question: How would you expect to have a file synced with dropbox and shared via dropbox without dropbox touching the bytes? Magic?
* you know what I mean by analysis, think gmail
I know that, and you know that, but I showed this article to my wife (who is a casual computer user), and while she understood the difference when explained, she said that as a non-techie, she interpreted the title differently. If you hash my data, and take action based on that hash, then you have looked at the data, however cursory or algorithmic it may have been.
FWIW, I had this same discussion on reddit, where it devolved instantly into name-calling. HN is much more civil. Thanks for that.
It's the DMCA sharing check that avoids 'looking' even in the most pedantic sense, not the overall use of Dropbox.
Dropbox has no idea what is on the volume.
(In an ideal world, you'd have a filesystem set up that was a separate encrypted file for each file in the virtual filesystem, with an additional encrypted file that contained the virtual directory info. But this is simpler.)