If you’re a Dropbox user or a Mega fan, you might want to keep reading.

Earlier this week, an intriguing domain made its way at SXSW 2013.  The site Dump Dropbox tells people why Dropbox users need to abandon the service.  Whoever made this site either has a grudge to hold since he listed numerous reasons why the service shouldn’t be trusted, or is just trying to prove a point.

TorrentFreak soon found out who was behind this slandering act: Ron Yokubaitis.

Yokubaitis is the co-founder of Golden Frog, the company behind Dump Truck, a cloud storage service like Dropbox which is given for free to Giganews subscribers, and VyprVPN, a provider of secure VPN accounts.  Giganews is a Usenet provider also co-founded by Yokubaitis.

“Yes, Golden Frog is behind the dumpdropbox.com website,” Yokubaitis told TorrentFreak in an interview.  “Austin is our hometown so we wanted do something fun at SXSW. We decided the dumpdropbox.com campaign was a fun way to inform users about the privacy and security issues that affect online storage. We hope these conversations continue beyond SXSW.”

According to Yokubaitis, one of Dropbox’s flaws is that it heavily relies on Amazon S3 to store and manage users’ files.  It was also mentioned that Dropbox uses deduplication which means it scans users’ files and if it finds that the file already exists on its server, the original file is kept, the copy discarded.  The process is done to reduce storage cost but it opens up the question as to whether this violates user privacy.

Now this seems like Yokubaitis is just promoting it’s own cloud storage service, right?

Another Dropbox flaw pointed out was that the servers it used are US-based.  So you ask, “But Dump Truck’s servers are also in the US, what’s the point?”  Yokubaitis stated that soon, Dump Truck users from Europe will be given a choice of storing their files in European servers only as the company will launch European servers later this year.

Europeans are skittish about US privacy policies, hence the Europe invasion.

But what is exactly wrong with US-based servers?  Yokubaitis referred to the arrest of William Steven Albaugh, a deacon at St. Joseph’s Church in Fullerton, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore, for harboring child ponrography on his Verizon Online Backup and Sharing account.  It just proves that you can’t keep anything a secret since service providers look at what you store in their servers.

Golden Frog isn’t the only one backhanding Dropbox.  Last month, VMware boldly stated that people should not resort to using web-based cloud services such Dropbox to store company files and collaborate with teams since it’s vulnerable to cyber attacks.

Because non-US servers were on the plate, Mega, the Megaupload replacement from Kim Dotcom, was considered.  Yokubaitis was asked if he sees Mega as a competitor in the cloud storage arena since it has been well received.  Not surprisingly, he doesn’t see Mega as something to be considered because of its history.

“Mega’s history makes them hard to trust with any important data. They’ve shown that they have little respect for governments and other corporations, and that leads to battles where the victim is the customer’s data. They might ‘beat the rap’, but their customers are getting ‘taken for a ride’,” Yokubaitis said.

Mega recently found its haven in New Zealand a year after the Megaupload takedown by the authorities.  Yokubaitis has a point.  Even if Mega’s servers are now in New Zealand there could be a repeat of the unfortunate takedown and users would once again be left hanging, hoping to get their files back.

So was this whole Dump Dropbox smear campaign just an elaborated advertising move for European customers?  Yes.  Does it have a point?  Yes.  Was the smear campaign called for?  Not really.

At the end of the day, one question remains: Do you trust what the competitor is saying about another brand?