I think one of the issues here is that most of us that use the "public" folder are counting on the fact that unless you know the exact address of the files in the folder you can almost (almost, but maybe not quite) assume that content in that folder is private. This isn't like people are just throwing ebooks into a "public" folder for the masses of the internet to gobble up. The purpose of the public folder is to be able to easily share, with those you give the address to, files that can be shared in a HTML/Website format (ie, a webpage).
An interesting thread on how "public" the public folder is can be found
here on the dropbox forums. This post by a moderator pretty much sums up how I thought the public folder operated:
Quote:
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crawlers can only index links that they can follow. if you never ever publish the public link to your file and nobody else ever ever find & publish it, then google won't be able to find it.
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In other words, if you do not publish somewhere on the web a link to any of the flies in your public folder, the odds of a search engine (or anyone else) finding any of those files is infinitesimally small. I may be totally wrong about that, but that is how I assumed the Dropbox public folder worked.