Thread: Adobe DE 4 spies on users
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Old 10-09-2014, 10:27 AM   #150
Froide
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Quote:
Originally Posted by soondai View Post
Well Nate certainly got some attention. It would be nice to see (outside of his comment section) a follow up describing efforts to reproduce the phenomenon of data being sent on books stored outside ADE.

As fjtorres suggests, maybe it happens on "production systems" instead of clean installs, but maybe Nate just doesn't remember accidentally opening the books with ADE at some point long ago, presumably by accident (I know I have done this)
Excerpted (boldface is mine) from:

Sean Gallagher. (Oct 7 2014, 7:00pm EST). "Adobe’s e-book reader sends your reading logs back to Adobe—in plain text [Updated]". Ars Technica.

Quote:
Ars has independently verified the logging of e-reader activity with the use of a packet capture tool. The exposure of data was first discovered by Nate Hoffelder of The Digital Reader, who reported the issue to Adobe but received no reply.

Digital Editions (DE) has been used by many public libraries as a recommended application for patrons wanting to borrow electronic books (particularly with the Overdrive e-book lending system), because it can enforce digital rights management rules on how long a book may be read for. But DE also reports back data on e-books that have been purchased or self-published. Those logs are transmitted over an unencrypted HTTP connection back to a server at Adobe—a server with the Domain Name Service hostname “adelogs.adobe.com”—as an unencrypted file (the data format of which appears to be JSON).

The behavior is part of Adobe's way of managing access to e-books borrowed from a library or "lent" by other users through online bookstores supporting the EPUB book format, such as Barnes & Noble. If you've "activated" Digital Editions with an Adobe ID, it uses that information to determine whether a book has been "locked" on another device using the same ID to read it or if the loan has expired. If the reader isn't activated, it uses an anonymous unique ID code generated for each DE installation.
Question:

Are B&N LendMe ebooks stored in My Digital Editions?
Last edited by Froide; 10-09-2014 at 10:38 AM.
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