How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

Great article, but poor conclusion. He finds that Dropbox is untrustworthy, a finding that likely surprises no one, and reaches for iCloud as the solution. Why move into another walled garden driven by corporate interests? OwnCloud or a similar self hosted solution would be better. I just use NFS and a dead simple storage server to make ~/shared available on all of my machines.

If you're going to use a Mac, you're trusting Apple already. How does using iCloud make you trust them more?

Because Apple doesn't have a mechanism to access files on your Mac, while they do have a mechanism to access files on iCloud. This means someone guessing your security questions, or somebody with a warrant, or somebody abusing their access rights can get to your files.

They do provide the OS, so they implicitly have access to all your files at a level that dropbox would have a hard time achieving.

> so they implicitly have access to all your files

If you can demonstrate how Apple has access to my files on an OS X installation with no iCloud configured, I will round up a massive bounty.

Open your finder. Every file that you see has just been touched by apples code.

Your OS does have access to all files that you have on your computer. It manages all network connections. It exposes all information that tools such as little snitch display to you. Apple signs and provides all software updates to you. They control SPI and app sandboxing. I'm not saying that Apple does access your files. I do trust them not to since they've shown that they at least attempt to step up and defend themselves and their users. Still, they could if they wanted to.