> you missed the qualifying remainder of that sentence, which that PHP isn't awful, but rather that the code looked janky.
In which case there was no need to remark "because it's written in PHP" other than to appeal to the HN PHP sucks hivemind for upvotes.
> This makes me nervous when part of my mission is privacy.
Then you should not be using Dropbox. At all. At least owncloud is open source. Audit it yourself and patch any security hole you find if you really care about privacy.
> Some of the 3rd party plugins look like a security nightmare.
Disable them if you feel this way.
> PHP by itself has had some security problems, but combine that with poor programming practices and I avoid it
PHP has problems sure, but so does every language. I assume you're referring to owncloud (re. poor programming) as opposed to PHP as whole. Perhaps it is true, but at least with owncloud you have the option of fixing problems you notice, a luxury the closed source binary alternative does not offer you.