Adobe Digital Editions 4.0 scans computer for ebooks, sends unencrypted info to Adobe

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Hapax Legomenon

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I'm not going to be as sensational about this as the original article I found this in, but it's still worrisome.

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.

...

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.
From here.

This is probably a huge privacy violation, security hole, or both (especially scanning your entire harddrive for books without permission). This is also likely a problem for libraries because of privacy protection for libraries and practically all of them that have ebooks use or require use of Adobe in some capacity.

For everyone worried about their privacy, ADE 2.0 and 3.0 apparently don't send unencrypted data to Adobe and scan your harddrive for books, and at least 3.0 is still available for download on Adobe's website.
 
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