Are there Now Public Links to Everything in My Dropbox?

Dropbox recently announced that you can now share files and folders already
in your Dropbox with a public link.

Previously, you could only share those files and folders you had explicitly
placed in a specific public folder within your Dropbox. Now, you can link to any
file anywhere in your Dropbox.

Anywhere?

Anywhere. And I’ll admit that made me nervous.

Until a friend pointed me at something that Dropbox failed to mention in
their announcement.

Links don’t exist until you create them

The concept that everything in my Dropbox might have a publicly accessible
link was more than a little disconcerting. Even though the links are clearly
very obscure – as we’ll see momentarily – that would still amount to “security
by obscurity” which amounts to simply hiding things in the hope that no one
would find it.

Fortunately, that’s apparently not what’s happening here.

It appears that the process of getting a link to an item that you want to
share actually creates the link – meaning that the link simply doesn’t exist
until you do that.

In other words, the only things that are publicly accessible are those things
in your Dropbox for which you explicitly create a link.

And even then, you can later invalidate the link.

Creating a link

Browsing your Dropbox contents on the Dropbox website, you can now right-click an item and click the new “Get link” menu item:

Click that and you’ll actually be taken to a link for the item:

The link can then be copied from your browser’s address bar.

In the example above, the link is to:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/mrk13zricufcb0b/2012-04-08%2008.19.49.jpg

You’ll note that the generated link is very obscure – there’s no easy way to
guess the link. It also uses https, which I appreciate.

In most of the Dropbox applications on PCs, Macs, and mobile devices, a
similar Get link option has been added so you don’t even need to go to the
website. In Windows, for example, just right-click the item and click the
Dropbox sub-menu.

(Note: As I was testing this, the Get link option was not available for items in my Photos folder. However, if I viewed the image on the website, then a Get
link item was available at the bottom of the page.)

But it gets better.

Removing a link

You can remove the links that you’ve created. (Big thanks to my friend Steve
over at Mac Help
For Mom for pointing this out.)

If you view your Dropbox on the web, you’ll see a link labeled Links:

Click that and you’ll get a list of all of the links that you’ve created:

Note the Remove link.

Each link can be individually removed.

Once you remove a link, the item is no longer accessible.

In my opinion, a perfect addition to the sharing solution.

Use common sense

As with all online services, uses common sense when sharing – or even
choosing what it is you want to place into your Dropbox.

For example, don’t share a folder (yes, you can share an entire folder) that
contains a bunch of private things in addition to the one picture that you’re actually
interested in sharing.

Realize that, should your Dropbox account be compromised, the person with
access will be able to access everything in it.

But when used sensibly, Dropbox remains a great way to share files and folders
between computers, and now even share files and folders with anyone who has
internet access.