Dropbox asking for sudo permission

Hi,

about half a year ago, dropbox started to ask for my password to do root things a few times a month. I never entered my password because it seemed suspicious and I don't want the dropbox stuff to mess around with my system.

Reading the lengthy bug report about how upstream Dropbox sucks, I'm wondering if dropbox was trying to auto-update the .dropbox-dist in /var/lib? I now purged dropbox from my system and reinstalled the nautilus-dropbox package and it seems like things started working again. Probably because the new dropbox version was downloaded on reinstallation.

So is it correct and safe (while realizing that dropbox is closed source) to just enter my password at the prompt so it can auto-update? Why can't we solve this by disabling auto-update altogether and releasing a new nautilus-dropbox (or something like dropbox-installer) when a new dropbox version is released? (Okay, I realize this won't help LTS users or non-security updates during a STS cycle.)