SXSW kicks off today in Austin, and a bunch of Dropboxers will be in town for SXSW Interactive. We’d love to say “Hi!” – here are some of the places you can find us this weekend:

Friday, March 7

Transparency Reporting for Beginners, with Bart Volkmer
12:30-1:30pm @ Sheraton Austin, Creekside  (701 E. 11th St)

Saturday, March 8

Dropbox Sponsored Dribbble Meetup, with the Dropbox design team
5-9pm @ ABGB (1305 W. Oltorf St)

Sunday, March 9

The Pivotal Moment: Leaping into the Enterprise, with Ilya Fushman
5-6pm @ Hilton Austin Downtown, Salon K (500 E. 4th St)

App Data, Everywhere: Cross-Device Content Sharing, with Leah Culver
5-6pm @ Four Seasons Ballroom (98 San Jacinto Blvd)

Plus, our Austin team will be on hand with coffee and some fun Dropbox swag – you can find us at Houndstooth Coffee Friday and Saturday from 12-4pm.

See ya down there!

It was only six months ago that we moved into a small office at 6th & Congress, but Austin already feels like home. It’s brought us closer to more of our users, partners, businesses — and introduced us to a new set of talented folks who share our passion for making life a little simpler for everyone.

We’re excited to be building deep roots in the city as we continue to expand beyond 200 million users and 4 million businesses. And today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’re expanding the Austin team, too — from 30 to 200.

If you live in the area or you’ve been looking for a reason to move to the “Live Music Capital of the World,” we’d love to hear from you. We’re looking for smart, awesome folks to join our sales, account management, and user operations teams. Head over to our Austin jobs page to find out more about what we’ve got going on!

We’ve made a lot of changes to Dropbox since we last updated our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and online Dropbox for Business Agreements. So today, we’re starting to email users to let you know about some updates to these policies. The updates will be effective on March 24, 2014.

We know that these types of updates are really important to you, and we want to help you understand them. Here’s a walk-through of the major changes:

• Arbitration. We’re adding arbitration clauses to our Terms of Service and Dropbox for Business online agreement. Arbitration is a faster and more efficient way to resolve legal disputes, and it provides a good alternative to things like state or federal courts, where the process could take months or even years. If you prefer to opt out of arbitration in the Terms of Service, there’s no need to fax us or trek to the post office — just fill out this quick online form.

• Permissions. We care about having Terms of Service that are readable, give the right amount of context, and avoid unnecessary legalese, so we’ve updated our language to better match the permissions you give us with the features you use. For example, to provide you with document previews, our automated systems need permission to access and scan your stuff for those previews — so we explain this in the new Terms.

• Privacy Policy. We’ve clarified several sections of our Privacy Policy to better explain how our services use your information. Take contacts, for example. When you give us access to your contacts, we’ll store them so that you — and only you — can easily share your stuff, regardless of whether you’re using Dropbox on your phone, tablet, or home computer. We’ve also added a section explaining our recently launched Government Data Request Principles, which describe our commitment to protecting your privacy when handling government requests.

• Mailbox. It’s been almost a year since Mailbox joined the Dropbox family, and we’re finally transitioning the app to the same Terms of Service and Privacy Policy as the rest of Dropbox.

• Dropbox for Business. We’ve made great leaps over the past year as we’ve grown and developed Dropbox for Business to help companies work smarter. Our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy updates more clearly reflect the advancements we’ve built for admins and end users.

We hope you’ll read the full Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Business Agreement. While we’ve simplified much of the language, our commitment to keeping your stuff safe and secure hasn’t changed. We don’t sell your personal information to third parties. We don’t serve ads based on the stuff you store in our services. And, as always, your stuff is yours.

Over the next few days, we’ll be emailing all our users to ensure you hear about these updates from us.

Like many tech companies, we occasionally receive requests from governments seeking information about our users. Today, we’re announcing a set of principles outlining our commitment to protecting your privacy when handling requests.

Transparency is one of these core principles. We believe everyone has a right to know how much information the government is seeking from online services. This lets users fight back against improper requests, helps prevent abuses of power, and allows for a more informed public debate. That’s why, whenever possible, we give users notice if their accounts are identified in law enforcement requests. And that’s why we were one of the first companies to publish Transparency Reports showing exactly how many law enforcement requests we’ve received.

Until recently, however, the US government prevented online services from disclosing anything about national security requests they received (that is, requests under the national security laws instead of requests from law enforcement officials investigating crimes). We don’t think that’s right, and we filed a legal brief asking the court to let online services report the exact number of national security requests they receive.

Last month, the government changed its position and now allows services to disclose the number of national security requests they receive — in bands of 250. This is a step in the right direction. But it doesn’t go far enough, especially for services that receive only a handful of requests or none at all. We believe the public has a right to know the actual number of requests received and accounts affected, and we’ll continue to push to be able to provide this information.

Today we also updated our Transparency Report for 2013. In addition to providing detailed data about the law enforcement requests we received over the past year, we’ve now included additional information about national security requests. As you’ll see, we received 0-249 national security requests in the last twelve months. We wish we could be more specific, but that’s all we can report right now. We’ll continue to advocate for more transparency and keep you updated about our progress.

Hi everyone,

On Friday evening we began a routine server upgrade. Unfortunately, a bug installed this upgrade on several active servers, which brought down the entire service. Your files were always safe, and despite some reports, no hacking or DDOS attack was involved.

While we restored most functionality three hours later, some users continued experiencing issues throughout the weekend across dropbox.com, our desktop client, and our mobile apps. Dropbox should now be up and running for all of you, but we’re working through a few last issues with the Dropbox photos tab. [UPDATE: The photos tab is now back. Thanks all for your patience!]

We know that many of you rely on Dropbox every day — we pride ourselves on reliability, and any downtime is unacceptable. In response, we’re currently building more tools and checks to make sure this doesn’t happen again. You can visit our tech blog to learn about this effort and read a more detailed explanation of events.

We’re sorry for the trouble this caused, and we thank you for your patience and support.

Aditya
VP of Engineering

Hey everyone,

I think 2013′s been a pretty great year. We refreshed just about everything we could, and started crafting a home for your photos. For people using Dropbox at work, we designed a brand new Dropbox for Business that gives both users and companies what they’ve been asking for. Meanwhile, we introduced the Dropbox Platform to developers worldwide, and brought Dropbox to seven new languages.

This stuff makes me happy, but none of it would’ve been possible without all the people who joined us. It’s crazy to me that we welcomed Mailbox, Endorse, Sold, PiCloud, and over 300 new Dropboxers to our family, all in one year. Dropbox is now home to the 500 most amazing people I know. And with new offices in Dublin and Austin, it’s the first time we’re not all under one roof.

But really, the best parts of 2013 lead us to the best parts of 2014. Whether you use Dropbox to safekeep photos, share files, or collaborate at work, we can’t wait to show you what we’ve been busy building for you. And though 2014 marks our seventh year as a company, our mission to simplify your life hasn’t changed at all. We’re so grateful you’re all a part of it :).

So whether you joined us this year, or have been with us from the beginning, thank you! It’s going to be a magical year.

Whether you’re sharing recent vacation photos with friends or collaborating on presentations with colleagues, Dropbox shared folders are great for working with others as though you’re on a single computer. Today, we’re making things even easier by letting you share folders on the go—straight from our Android app!

To get started, simply create a new folder (or pick an existing one) and tap ‘Share’ from its quick actions. From there, it’s easy to invite people to your folder so you can all access and work on the same content. Of course, you can always change members or permissions from your shared folder’s settings, too.

Android users can get started today by grabbing the latest Dropbox app from the Play Store. iOS users, hang tight—mobile sharing will come your way early next year.

Happy sharing!

There’s a new Dropbox for iPhone and iPad out today, featuring a refreshed design inspired by Apple’s iOS 7! We considered every aspect of the app, took the time to make sure we did a thorough job, and simplified a whole bunch of stuff.

The new Dropbox app is a bit like a new beginning for Dropbox on iOS. While many things will feel familiar, we hope you’ll notice the small tweaks that make a pretty big difference. And maybe best of all, it sets the stage for some exciting things to come.

If you’ve got an iPad or iPhone, go grab the new Dropbox from the App Store!

We introduced Dropbox for Business to help companies work smarter. And as more teams picked it up, we discovered a new challenge for businesses and users. On one hand, people wanted to access their personal stuff at work; meanwhile, IT admins wanted to keep company data separate and free of personal files. Both needs were real, but people had to choose between two Dropboxes.

We thought about this from scratch and designed a solution we’re excited to share: connecting your personal Dropbox to your Dropbox for Business account. This’ll give you a personal Dropbox and a work Dropbox on all of your devices so you’ll never have to choose between them. It’ll be like having your house keys and your work keycard on the same keychain.

But this is about more than having two places for all your stuff. Take the mobile app — once you connect your Dropboxes, you’ll be able to get to both Dropbox folders from the same Files tab. Dropbox is also smart about making sure your stuff goes where it’s supposed to. For example, photos you add via Camera Upload will instantly show up in the Photos tab, but they’ll stay for your eyes only.

We want Dropbox to be the home for all your stuff, and we think this beats using two different services or having to log out and switch accounts. More importantly, this is a huge step toward making Dropbox even better for work, and we’re excited to share everything else we’re cooking up. We’re rolling this out to Dropbox for Business customers starting this month — check out our Dropbox at work blog to learn more.

You might already be a fan of Camera Uploads, which beams all the photos you take on your phone and tablet straight to a safe place in your Dropbox. But have you ever wondered, “Why doesn’t Dropbox do that for the screenshots I take on my computer, too?”

Well stop wondering! Starting today, all the screenshots you take can automatically be saved straight to your Dropbox. And on top of that, Dropbox will also create a link to your screenshot and copy it to your clipboard — so your picture’s instantly good to share. Whether you’re capturing screenshots of websites, favorite dog videos, or video calls with your buddy in São Paulo, now Dropbox can help keep your computer a little more organized.

As an added bonus for all you Mac users, today’s update also includes a nice little importer that copies your photos from iPhoto directly to your Dropbox.

A lot goes into keeping all your photos in one place and always having them handy to share, and we hope small improvements like these return that time to you. This way you can focus on taking photos and screenshots — and let Dropbox take care of the rest.

Happy snapping!