What a deeply troubling article!
a) Typical situation of causation is not correlation.
b) Using Dropbox data from 400.000 academic users without consent? They say the data was anonymised, yet contained folder structure, institution, and researchers' seniority. WTF!
a) Typical situation of causation is not correlation.
b) Using Dropbox data from 400.000 academic users without consent? They say the data was anonymised, yet contained folder structure, institution, and researchers' seniority. WTF!
I have sent an email to @DropboxSupport, inquiring about the sharing of data. 
Here's a rephrased article on the Dropbox blog: blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2018/0…
Interestingly though it says that they looked at 100 universities, while the other article stated 1000.
Interestingly though it says that they looked at 100 universities, while the other article stated 1000.
It has (sort of!) an acknowledgement about correlation vs. causation - which is then crushed with last sentence: "Still, at least some of these trends may hold for many team-based research projects - something you might keep in mind for your next company project or presentation."
Dropbox claims in an email-response to a press inquiry by @zackwhittaker that HBR article contains false info. Unfortunately this doesn't explain whether consent has been sought, how researchers' seniority was determined, who saw non-anonymised data, etc. zdnet.com/article/dropbo…
So I received the following reply from @DropboxSupport. Unfortunately this doesn't answer 13/14 of the questions I originally sent them...
And now the HBR article has been updated, with the only change being in the 1st sentence of 4th paragraph:
"Dropbox gave us access to project-folder-related data, which ̶w̶e̶ Dropbox had aggregated and anonymized, for all the scientists using its platform over the period[...]"
"Dropbox gave us access to project-folder-related data, which ̶w̶e̶ Dropbox had aggregated and anonymized, for all the scientists using its platform over the period[...]"
I have sent a follow up email to @DropboxSupport, as they haven't answered most of my questions. In particular how researchers' seniority was determined, whether consent had been sought which accounts were affected, and who had access to non-anonymised data.
