Show HN: Check who, when and how is viewing your PDF | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Check who, when and how is viewing your PDF

helprange.com

12 pointsjasekt12 comments

I wanted to find our how you were tracking live results when viewing (as it turns out, a JS PDF viewer) but found the requirement of entering an email address to be a big hurdle.

It might make sense to have a demo where people can see how the PDF viewer works (so they know what they'll be sending their clients) before requiring them to give out their information.

Also, I noted that the PDF I uploaded is not the same as the one that came back (different md5 sum). What are you changing in the upload? Is there some form of tracking embedded in the PDFs themselves?

There is no form of tracking embedded in the PDF. Currently we are changing your file only to be sure that file is not malformed in any way as specified by PDF format.

Thank you for your feedback.

We thought that it would be best if you test it with your own file. In that case we need to send you link to analytics in case you want to remove pdf from our servers.

Your suggestion seems to have potential to considerably lower friction. We will look into it, thanks.

You could just delete files created with no email after a few hours.

I could not find an explanation on how it works. How could you possibly know when I am opening your PDF file ? I presume opening your PDF file will trigger some kind of http / socket request to a site that you control. so how would you control companies'firewall ? and/or any other settings that could prevent my pdf reader to go online

Really cool, really creepy. Best of luck, I guess? I think it's kind of unsettling someone could track where I'm reading on a PDF ...

Our tracking feature is a kind of a website analytics tool tailored for PDF usage. When interacting with companies you can safely assume that you are being tracked and analysed. We are adding another layer that gives companies additional information, potentially making your life a little bit easier. Of course one can argue it can be misused. We have tried to mitigate it by branding PDF viewer and being open about it.

>Our tracking feature is a kind of a website analytics tool tailored for PDF usage. When interacting with companies you can safely assume that you are being tracked and analysed. We are adding another layer that gives companies additional information, potentially making your life a little bit easier. Of course one can argue it can be misused. We have tried to mitigate it by branding PDF viewer and being open about it.

>When interacting with companies you can safely assume that you are being tracked and analysed.

Welcome to the new normal ... I realize this is standard practice under the veil of "increasing customer satisfaction using large scale data analysis" but it still feels iffy if stated explicitly.

Very interesting project! Do you have a monetization strategy in mind already, or it will be created later on?

Is there plan to add ads to PDF's?

Thank you :) We have never intended to show adds. In our opinion it could be counterproductive in the long term. Our monetization strategy assumes having free pdf sharing to spread the word and paying enterprise customers to pay the bills. Yet it is about to be tested.

I really want to use this - I run a school student newsletter and would love to be able to see how people are reading it. Unfortunately I'd want to host this on my own server that I already have set up serving the PDFs with some small PHP scripts and Caddy. Any options for this use case?

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