Dropbox recently restored years-old "deleted" files for some customer accounts by accident, drawing attention to a potential privacy problem. Files supposedly deleted by customers from the company's servers were instead retained for as long as eight years, according to several reports over the past few weeks.

The company apologized for what it has described as "a bug" as well as a botched software fix that led to the unintended document recoveries. Normally, Dropbox permanently wipes files—eradicating the data from its servers—60 days after a person deletes them, in accordance with the company's privacy policy.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden dropped his two cents on file storage security in an interview with The Guardian on Thursday.

He thinks Dropbox, the cloud storage firm with over 200 million users, is “hostile to privacy,” and urged people to switch to what he calls more-secure storage services like SpiderOak. “Dropbox is a targeted wannabe PRISM partner,” Snowden told The Guardian. “They just put Condoleezza Rice on their board, who is probably the most anti-privacy official you can imagine … So they’re very hostile to privacy.” Snowden said that a company like SpiderOak is better because it offers “zero knowledge,” a term used to describe services that have zero access to the data they are storing on their servers. 

On assurance of service administration, they needed a person with experience in international affairs in order to resolve problems in foreign countries where the service is forbiden (for example, in China).

There are 3 interesting things:

First, most of us remember well how Rice can solve the problem. Secondly her firm RiceHadleyGates is a Dropbox advisor long ago, and thirdly we can recall the recent story about how Dropbox did not give the user to share the pirate movie file, in some sly way determining that it was pirate, while solemnly assuring that Dropbox do not touch files (actually touch, but it seems like only pablike and by comparing hashes, but that's another topic).