A while ago I wrote about the developing ‘scandal’ involving Dropbox’s supposed admission that they could read your data. As I remarked at the time, no one with an ounce of sense ever thought otherwise but the question did remain as to what a user could do to protect sensitive files from rogue Dropbox employees or subpoenas. When I wrote that, there didn’t seem to be any good answers short of encrypting the files yourself. That takes a bit of discipline, of course, and could lead those with insufficient amounts of paranoia to not bother just this once.
Now Andrew over at WEB UPD8 has a nice post that shows us how to encrypt some or all of those files automatically. He does this by using EncFS. EncFS use two directories: files put in the first show up encrypted in the second. The idea is that you put the encrypted folder in your Dropbox and place the files you want encrypted and synced with Dropbox in the other directory. The nice thing is that you can put nonsensitive files in the Dropbox as before and they won’t be encrypted.
EncFS uses the Linux fuse facility but solutions exists for the Mac (macfuse) and Windows (BoxCryptor) so Andrew’s idea is portable to the big three. This is a really nice hack and if you are using Dropbox and worried about keeping your data private, you should head over to WEB UPD8 and read all the details. If you’re on the Mac there are directions for setting EncFS up here.