ALA Cites Concerns Over Adobe's E-Book Platform

Adobe Digital Editions has been fielding harsh criticism since users found out that the latest version of Adobe Digital Editions is collecting user-data and sending it back to Adobe. According to this recent article at Publishers Weekly, the American Librarian Association suggests you think twice before dipping into that digital edition of Leaves of Grass. From Publishers Weekly:

Adobe has been under heavy criticism since a report from Nate Hoffelder at the Digital Reader revealed that the latest version of Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) is collecting and transmitting unencrypted user data back to Adobe. This week, in a message to concerned officials at the American Library Association, Adobe defended its system, and, according to ALA, suggested an update was coming by October 20.

A statement to ALA from Adobe read: “User privacy is very important to Adobe, and all data collection in Adobe Digital Editions is in line with the end user license agreement and the Adobe Privacy Policy.”

Adobe officials claim their data collection is used only for proper “license validation, and to facilitate the implementation of different licensing models by publishers and distributors.” But a chorus of concerned individuals and organizations has expressed alarm over Adobe’s actions—including librarians, as the ADE e-book reader application is used by “thousands of libraries and many tens of thousands of e-book readers around the globe.”

“It’s complicated,” explains PW contributing editor Peter Brantley, noting that the latest version of ADE apparently sends information “in the clear,” (that is without encryption) back to Adobe, including reader account information, device ID, and pages read (at least of the books in the ADE library, and possibly other books on the user's device, though Adobe denies this). “It's not great that ADE, without any notice, is sending this kind of data back to Adobe, where it is not obvious what is happening with it. Maybe nothing,” Brantley told PW. Regardless, he adds, the collection and transmission of such unencrypted data "abrogates assumptions of reader privacy and creates a hackable dataset.”

In a blog post, the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), a division of the ALA, decried what they called “confirmed reader data breaches” and expressed a number of concerns beyond the “data transmission” issue. [...]

Learn more at Publishers Weekly.