OK, let's try this again, with less space-wasting clowning and with some focus on the issue of privacy. I'm starting a new thread as the clowns took over the first one and I have new details.
In the other thread, the.Mtn.Man and charleski made a couple of substantial points but are wrong on the facts and interpretation in this case. TedJ, avantman42, JSWolf, The Terminator, MorganM, beautifulsoup, and ScalyFreak obviously have nothing to contribute and I would challenge the karma points some of you have awarded yourselves.
First, take a look at the thumbnail below. It's a screengrab of a piece of the ADE error-message debris that flew by as ADE crashed when, as always does, it encountered my Kobo WiFi. Here's the text, in case the thumbnail is hard to read:
Adobe Digital Editions
The Story of a Lie - Stevenson_Robert Louis.epub:
IO Error on local file open
Path:
L:\Stevenson_Robert Louis\The Story of a Lie (1267)\The
Story of a Lie - Stevenson_Robert Louis.epub
Event Detail:
Error #2038
---end---
OK
Drive L: is one of my USB ports. Error 2038, discussed elsewhere and at Adobe's ADE forum, is a general-purpose error.
Here are the facts of the matter:
--I downloaded this public-domain Stevenson ebook from the University of Adelaide collection via weblink and imported it
directly into Calibre, which numbered it 1267. That is Calibre's number, not mine, not Kobo's.
--I did
not import this ebook into ADE. ADE has had no connection with this ebook.
--I have
not informed ADE that I have Calibre on my PC as well as the desktop apps for Kindle and Kobo. I have
not instructed ADE that I want it to monitor every ebook it can find on my PC. The ADE user has no access to these non-transparent functions.
--I did
not sideload that ebook into my Kobo at any point. I did
not open it in any ereader or even the Calibre viewer. There can be
no bookmark,
no annotations,
no record of any activity other than its presence in the Calibre database.
So what we have here is an inert ebook that exists in my system only in Calibre.
And is being tracked by Adobe Digital Editions.
Why?
charleski (#5 in the other thread) believes that ADE is syncing annotations. the.Mtn.Man (#2) suggests ADE "probably has to make a catalog of what's already on the reader [Kobo] in order to avoid conflicts when transferring new books."
What syncing? ADE crashed the first time I plugged in my Kobo, and has crashed every single time, whether it is running when Kobo is plugged in or I try to boot it when Kobo is already plugged in, and this is also the case when no other ebook app, including Calibre, is running. There is
no working relationship whatsoever between ADE and my Kobo.
But I have to use ADE. It has an exclusive role in getting public library ebooks via Overdrive. ADE has an exclusive role in downloading a good number of ebook purchases. I have no choice to have it on my PC. But I won't use it for elibrary management and can't use it with my Kobo for any function. I use the ever-evolving and useful Calibre to run my elibrary.
I ask this forum: Why is ADE poking around in a desktop and tracking all titles in a Calibre library? Not just on my computer: yours. And yours.
Would it be okay for MS Word on its own to poke around and find all possible text documents or other material that could be opened in Word? No. Would it be okay for Google News to monitor what news items are opened in Yahoo News? No. Would it be okay for Netflix to monitor Hulu activity on your computer? Of course not.
Yet ADE is monitoring my ebooks in the database of another program, Calibre, and it is doing so without user activation, initiation, preference, or permission. There is no opt-in or opt-out choice here. And no possibility of disabling that function.
In terms of user utility, ADE is doing nothing useful in tracking my elibrary. Explicitly, it can exercise some kind of control over the 43 borrowed and purchased books, as for example it removes access to borrowed books after three weeks. Implicitly, no common-sense understanding of what function ADE has on a computer would encompass general roundup and monitoring of one's ereading.
I find nothing in the ADE webpages at Adobe suggesting that it has a natural, obvious, built-in, "everybody knows" function to monitor all the digital books on a computer. Yet in a non-transparent way, it has that design function.
As to privacy, Adobe has no separate privacy policy for Adobe Digital Editions. The general policy at
http://www.adobe.com/misc/privacy.html is long and plainly written but no reference to ADE or user ebook data. While the policy offers some broad privacy protection, it also has some broad allowances for Adobe and agents, as for example:
You also acknowledge that in certain countries or with respect to certain activities, the collection, transfer, storage, and processing of your information may be undertaken by trusted third party vendors or agents of Adobe such as credit card processors, shipping agents, web hosting providers, mail and email service providers, communication services, and web analytic providers, to help facilitate Adobe in providing certain functions.
In a letter I am asking Adobe to explain precisely (a) why ADE is monitoring a Calibre database without user knowledge and (b) what the ADE privacy policies are regarding the ADE's collection, transfer, storage, and processing functions.