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Originally Posted by fjtorres
Nate explicitly states that several of the books logged were DRM-free and were never opened. Period. At least some of those title should have been invisible to ADE.
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Yes, Nate said as much. The reason that some of us are questioning the idea is because no one else seems to have verified the activity. From your cited article in the
Register:
"Hoffelder claimed Digital Editions 4 slurped and leaked the metadata of all the ebooks on his system – not just the ones read using the application. Adobe said this shouldn't [be] possible, but has its developers checking again to make sure this isn't a bug."
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If you read the full list of items Adobe admits they log and why, in the Register article linked to in a post here, above, you'll find that they look for "certified app id" to fight DRM cracking. Nate has tested several Alf-ie tool plug-ins (most recently during the Kobo downloads discussions) and has confirmed his system has Calibre plugins installed. It has been speculated, and not just by me, that ADE 4 looks for Calibre plugins and/or DRM-free ebooks in its library to see if the user has removed DRM from commercial ebooks. It has also suggested that it might have scanned the calibre library because of some interaction with Calibre in server mode. Last I looked in the comments there, it was still an open question.
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According to the nine bullet points in the two lists within the article, Adobe appears to be checking whether books that do have DRM are being read on certified devices and whether those books have been copied too many times. I seem to be missing the part of the list in which Adobe admits scanning de-DRM'd books to see whether they've been cracked.
If "[i]t has been speculated . . . that ADE 4 looks for Calibre plugins and/or DRM-free ebooks in its library to see if the user has removed DRM from commercial ebooks," then I haven't seen corroboration outside of Nate's article. Perhaps you'd be kind enough to link to an example or two.
It's a question not of an individual journalist's credibility but of being able to repeat the reported behavior to judge whether it is a problem for others.
That said, by siphoning and sending unencrypted data that surveys users' libraries and sums page turns within a single book, Adobe seems to be trespassing in ways in which other companies (cf. Amazon and Apple) do not.