Cloud storage firm hails 'brilliant' former US secretary of state, but some users worried about pro-surveillance stance

Dropbox's decision to appoint former US secretary of state Dr Condoleezza Rice to the cloud storage service's board of directors has sparked a heated online row over her views on internet surveillance.

Protesters have set up a website – Drop Dropbox – describing the appointment as "deeply disturbing" and encouraging people to switch to rival services if the company doesn't "drop" Rice.

But supporters of Rice's appointment have also been making their views known on the blog post by Dropbox chief executive Drew Houston that announced the appointment. "When looking to grow our board, we sought out a leader who could help us expand our global footprint," wrote Houston.

"Dr Rice has had an illustrious career as Provost of Stanford University, board member of companies like Hewlett Packard and Charles Schwab, and former United States Secretary of State. We’re honored to be adding someone as brilliant and accomplished as Dr. Rice to our team."

The anonymous creators of Drop Dropbox beg to differ, citing her role as US president George W Bush's national security advisor in the run-up to the last Iraq War; her past position as a director at energy company Chevron; and most controversially of all, her past defence of warrantless wiretaps on US citizens by the National Security Agency (NSA).

"Given everything we now know about the US's warrantless surveillance program, and Rice's role in it, why on earth would we want someone like her involved with Dropbox, an organisation we are trusting with our most important business and personal data?," claims the site, which is encouraging people to post their agreement on Twitter and Facebook using the #DropDropbox hashtag.

"Condoleezza Rice should not be on the Board of Directors of Dropbox and her selection shows that Drew Houston and the senior management at Dropbox are ethically short-sighted."

For her part, Rice has suggested that her experience will benefit Dropbox as it grapples with the privacy implications of the last year's revelations about surveillance by the NSA, GCHQ and other security agencies.

"As a country, we are having a great national conversation and debate about exactly how to manage privacy concerns. I look forward to helping Dropbox navigate it," she told Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

A number of supporters have defended her in the comments section of Houston's blog post, citing her race, gender and political views as welcome signs of diversity in Silicon Valley, although the debate is also – perhaps inevitably – splitting along political lines.

Rice's appointment came alongside other changes at Dropbox, which also hired former Motorola boss Dennis Woodside as its new chief operating officer, revamped its Dropbox for Business service, and launched a standalone photo and video-sharing app called Carousel.

Dropbox raised $250m of funding in January at a $10bn valuation, taking its total raised since 2007 to $607m. The company has 275 million people using its service, which enables them to store their files on its servers and access them from all their devices.

The nature of its business means Dropbox has been one of the technology companies under scrutiny since the NSA revelations based on documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.

Dropbox updated its privacy policy on 24 March to set out "Government Data Requests Principles" promising to be transparent about data requests from governments, fight blanket requests, protect users regardless of their location or nationality; and work to protect its systems from the kind of "backdoor" intrusions that have been revealed by the Snowden documents.

"Stewardship of your data is critical to us and a responsibility that we embrace," explains the company's privacy policy. "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."

With questions around how wholeheartedly Dropbox can embrace those privacy responsibilities with Rice on its board, it remains to be seen how many of those 275m users will heed Drop Dropbox's call to flee to rivals including Box.com, Microsoft's OneDrive, SpiderOak and Google Drive.

• July 2013: Dropbox passes 175m users and turns up the heat on Apple's iCloud