Switched off by sanctions: no Dropbox in Crimea, North Korea, and Syria

Because Dropbox is a US company, it must comply with US trade-sanctions and embargo programs administered by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). As a result, Dropbox states that it cannot offer some or all of its services in certain sanctioned countries and regions — its help documentation specifically names Crimea, North Korea, and Syria, and US sanctions have at various times also implicated other jurisdictions.

For an individual user in an affected region, the practical effect can be severe and sudden: access to an existing account and the files in it may be blocked, not because of anything the user did, but because of where they are and which government their provider answers to. Unlike the China block (imposed by a foreign government), this restriction is imposed by Dropbox itself to satisfy its own home country's law — a different but equally concrete demonstration that a US cloud provider's service is conditional on US foreign policy.

Sanctions compliance is legally mandatory and not unique to Dropbox. The entry documents it because it is another way users can lose access to their own data through no fault of their own, and because it highlights the sovereignty trade-off of storing files with a single-jurisdiction provider.