I'm not sure why you're being so cranky about this. I'm doing my best to be as clear as possible.
1. The Dropbox license is scoped correctly, IMO. It's as narrow as it should be, and not so narrow that it would impair their ability to provide the service.
2. All commercial relationships come down to trust. Contracts only take you so far. If a provider offers acceptable contract terms, but has also shown signs of incompetence or untrustworthiness, I would avoid them. After all, how likely are you to enforce the contract terms against them?
HTH – and again – this is not intended to be legal advice or to create an attorney-client relationship.
I'm confused. Upthread, you said (paraphrased) "companies that reserve rights beyond what's absolutely necessary tend not to be doing this in their users best interests". You didn't then qualify this with "but of course that's not what Dropbox is doing".
Maybe we just agree about Dropbox --- that this latest ToS karfluffle is just a banal legal/administrative thing, not evidence of any cavalier attitude at Dropbox about user data.
We do agree. I also agree that my comment above was a little misleading. That's because the OP's article quotes a version of the Dropbox TOS that isn't the current version anymore, apparently.
1. The Dropbox license is scoped correctly, IMO. It's as narrow as it should be, and not so narrow that it would impair their ability to provide the service.
2. All commercial relationships come down to trust. Contracts only take you so far. If a provider offers acceptable contract terms, but has also shown signs of incompetence or untrustworthiness, I would avoid them. After all, how likely are you to enforce the contract terms against them?
HTH – and again – this is not intended to be legal advice or to create an attorney-client relationship.