Adobe is Spying on Users, Collecting Data on Their eBook Libraries
Adobe is gathering data on the ebooks that have been opened, which pages were read, and in what order. All of this data, including the title, publisher, and other metadata for the book is being sent to Adobe’s server in clear text.
I am not joking; Adobe is not only logging what users are doing, they’re also sending those logs to their servers in such a way that anyone running one of the servers in between can listen in and know everything,
Adobe isn’t just tracking what users are doing in DE4; this app was also scanning my computer, gathering the metadata from all of the ebooks sitting on my hard disk, and uploading that data to Adobe’s servers.
And just to be clear, this includes not just ebooks I opened in DE4, but also ebooks I store in calibre and every Epub ebook I happen to have sitting on my hard disk.
Source: Nate Hoffelder - The Digital Reader
This is great! And by great I mean terrible in so many ways it fills me with glee.
Adobe is tracking everything you read all the time, even stuff you don't open with Adobe DE4 (in comments, people say DE3 and earlier don't have this "feature")
This is totally separate from their need to connect to a server for DRM purposes, which is bad enough.
Adobe is sending it to its server in plain text, meaning anybody sitting around with Wireshark running on a library open network could pick up everything everybody in the room is reading
A book nerd blogger broke this news, not libraries or a librarian, even though we spend a lot of time and money on ebook platforms that require the use of Digital Editions
There is already somebody in the comments complaining that their library makes them use DE, so isn't this the library's fault too?
If the ALA put out a statement and Adobe counters with "OK, we'll encrypt it, but we're not stopping the data collection", are libraries prepared to dump Adobe? Are they prepared to make Overdrive drop Adobe? (The answer, in case you're wondering, is no.)