The Snowden Effect in Relation to Entrepreneurship
Dropbox is a free service that grants its users the permission to bring all their photos, docs, and videos anywhere. Small entrepreneurial businesses such as Dropbox believe that they play a role in regards to establishing surveillance for their data. It stated that it pledges to abide by its Government Request Principles when “receiving, scrutinizing and responding to government requests for our users’ data” (Kabin). Dropbox is beginning to take these actions because of its following strong belief: “Stewardship of your data is critical to us and a responsibility that we embrace. We believe that our users' data should receive the same legal protections regardless of whether it's stored on our services or on their home computer's hard drive” (Kabin). Dropbox believes so strongly in protecting its users and plans on taking the following actions:
“fight blanket data requests and protect its systems from intrusive measures like government-installed backdoors”
“report specific numbers in terms of the government data requests they receive and that such requests should be limited to specific people and investigations”
Dropbox’s new policy went into effect as of March 24.
The impact of the Snowden Effect on Entrepreneurs:
entrepreneurs want to cash in on privacy concerns
With new knowledge comes a strong demand for government actions
How the Snowden Effect impacts how the U.S. does business with China:
According to Kristine Kwok and Stephen Chen, the Chinese telecommunication companies such as China Unicom have begun to replace a number of critical routers made by Cisco with domestic products in order to “increase the security level of China's backbone internet infrastructure” (Kwok).
Source:
Kabin, Benjamin. Dropbox Addresses NSA Surveillance Fears in New Privacy Policy. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Apr. 2015. <http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/231722>.
Kwok, Kristine, and Stephen Chen. Snowden effect changes US-China dynamic on cybersecurity. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Apr. 2015. <http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1532984/snowden-effect-changes-us-china-dynamic-cybersecurity>.