Down the Rabbit Hole: E-Books and User Privacy in the 21st Century
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Authors
Henslee, Elizabeth
Issue Date
2015-12
Type
Journal Article
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Abstract
INTRODUCTION|When Amazon.com released the Kindle in 2007, the first lot sold out in five and a half hours, and remained out of stock for several months. Since that time, e-readers and e-books have been embraced by the public offering light weight alternatives to tangible books (the first Kindle weighed 10.3 ounces) with seemingly limitless access to a virtual library. But, it appears, thee-reader public may have fallen down a ''very deep well." In October of 2014, it was reported that Adobe was using their e-book software to spy on their users. Adobe gathered data on e-books in the user's library -Including cases that were read- and transmitted that data in unencrypted, plain text back to their servers. Adobe used this software in conjunction with overdrive, a popular e-book lending system used with libraries. When confronted by the American Library Association, Adobe defended its system stating, "all data collection in Adobe Digital Editions is in line with the end user licence agreement and the Adobe Privacy Policy. Overdrive, the e-book lending system used in many libraries, received publicity earlier in 2011 by contracting with Amazon.com and requiring users to register accounts to check out e-books formatted for a Kindle device. Amazon used this information the same way it treated information from retail sales, and used the data about user reading habits to market its own services and products. Further, all of this information can be sold to a third party in almost every jurisdiction in the United States...
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Publisher
Creighton University School of Law