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Private folder - Turn off or remove (Dropbox business)

I use dropbox business for my company (I'm the admin).

I want to know if' there's anyway to turn off private folders for users? The reason is that in our business there's no reason for a "private folder" ofc for various reasons.

Simply sharing the "private folder" is also not a solution for 100 people as an example.

So from a compliance/auditing/security point of view can this be done?

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Accepted answers

Fiona

Hello @LAWFIRM-ADMIN,

Thanks for sharing details of your workflow to explain how important an option like this would be. I completely understand and I first want to invite you to share this idea in detail, in our share an idea section of the Community.

Allow me to elaborate on the logic behind the purple folders in teams.

Users onboard from personal accounts. Thus they sometimes already have personal files in their accounts. We cannot show these files to the whole team, just because the member onboarded.
Users outside your team might choose to share a folder/file with one of your members. In this case, the sender did not choose to show his files to all of you. They shared with only one user/email address. So the rest of the team should not be able to see this folder and this is one of the reasons the purple folder is an important location in team accounts.

Finally, please have in mind that our Business Advanced subscription offers a feature called sign in as user. With this feature, you can sign in as the members of your team and check or even take action on the purple/personal folder files. 🔍

:books: Sign in as one of your Dropbox Business team members

Let us know if this feature could be helpful in your case.

Thank you for your feedback!

All comments

Lusil

Hi @kelos-01.

Although I understand your thought process on this, currently this is not possible as each user can have a private folder and shared folders; there isn’t a way to disable this.

Hope this clears up some confusion.

LAWFIRM-ADMIN

Uhhh ... @Lusil ... Wow this is TERRIBLE as a multi billion dollar company you are.

We are in the same position ( I AM THE ADMIN) for a Law Firm, and there is NO reason for users, lets say 50, to have their own private folder as it can cause security, compliance and mischievous actions and breach company security. And if anyone has anything to say about this, then these persons/employees can go home and save private files on their own personal computer, NOT company owned assets.

Dropbox is also being paid by the Employer, therefore the asset/intellectual property and information is OWNED by the employer (hence the private folder) and NOT the employer and we should have a way to remove or turn off. You cant just hide files from an Employer, Operations Manager or HR when you are at a place of business.

If a law suit occurs, and exhibits or information are held in PRIVATE FOLDERS and not submitted into the court, and no one can see them, then this could result in a multi-million dollar counter suit and damages. CHANGE YOUR POLICIES Dropbox and STOP flowing with the times. I know 2019 and 2020 are the years of entitlement and everyone is offended at something, but you dont reserve the right to harbour privacy and damages as a result of hidden and private files from an Emplpoyer that pays YOUR bill. And this can be a costly invoice Annually/Monthly! We dont complain about paying you, you should have an option to either Remove/Allow Private those private folders, how's THAT for equality.

Stop acting like Facebook and creating controlled environments, thats a Free board, your services are PAID!

Fiona

Hello @LAWFIRM-ADMIN,

Allow me to elaborate on the logic behind the purple folders in teams.

Users onboard from personal accounts. Thus they sometimes already have personal files in their accounts. We cannot show these files to the whole team, just because the member onboarded.
Users outside your team might choose to share a folder/file with one of your members. In this case, the sender did not choose to show his files to all of you. They shared with only one user/email address. So the rest of the team should not be able to see this folder and this is one of the reasons the purple folder is an important location in team accounts.

:books: Sign in as one of your Dropbox Business team members

Let us know if this feature could be helpful in your case.

Thank you for your feedback!

lkarma1

Hey Fiona,

It's me again ;-) We connected on another forum earlier this year regarding the new release of Surface X tablets and searching for an override to not use Dropbox For S Mode. We returned the Surface X's with our tech vendor and instead rolled back to the Surface 7's so that we can leverage the standard desktop version of Dropbox.

Similar to this topic, I'm automating logic on daily field reports for our crews when on job sites to connect via API and save a version within our Dropbox For Business environment. The connector testing results are functioning as expected, expect there's one large hiccup. It's creating a new path under the purple shared folder for my user which is a big no no, instead of searching the shared root directory for all users to gain access to. I suspect because this private folder exists first in the root / top level and that it is using my credentials to connect via API to run the function.

Nevertheless, the previous posts on this community thread certainly shared our common concerns for security / auditing / centralized file management, etc, but here's another reason to AT THE VERY LEAST provide the option for admins in the admin console that support your product and pay you for your services to toggle the private folders on or off based on desired company policy that we choose. Otherwise perhaps this product tier should be renamed to Dropbox For Business But Not Your Business since the brainstorming of these types of features severely limits us to do our job with minimal resistance of managing the software.

Does you dev team know of a work around, so if I were to add additional hidden parameters to the folder path that it would override the current personal folder path?

Currently the folder path is:

FormsOnFire/FormData/ExpenseReports

Dropbox interprets this call as {CompanyName/UserPersonalFolder/FormsOnFire/FormData/ExpenseReports}

When it should really be {CompanyName/FormsOnFire/FormDataExpenseReports}

Since I cannot specify a user without the purple personal folder, there's no point in not using my user's permissions for testing. And given that (as I mentioned earlier this year) we're a holdings firm with 2TB of data spread across the companies - I'm not interested in migrating away or being told to use OneDrive.

Thanks!

-Eric

NickiE1

Has any progress been made on this in the last 2 years? I am deciding which cloud platform to go with, and this is one of the sticking points that is making me lean towards not using Dropbox.