Comment by Springtime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Springtime | Hacker News Reader

> Many students are required to use Elsevier’s digital books and learning products in order to complete coursework... By default, Elsevier surveils every page a student visits on the internet—whether it’s related to their education or a google search for nearby abortion clinics. Then... sell[s] this information to data brokers.

Am I missing something where it goes from reading Elsevier's books and using their site to making the leap to internet-wide surveillance?

From skimming through the SPARC report they cite it seems various findings are based on privacy policy language, one of which states that 'browsing history', 'search history' and 'interactions with our and other websites' may be collected, though this reads like it may just involve their own sites' analytics with only the latter involving other sites (which could be just outlinks but is unclear).

While the rest of the report seems to just cover some overviews of their own cookies and open-ended concerns about third-party scripts (which include general CDNs and their own analytics hosted by third-parties).

its one example. then she list 4 others. your company probably gives you safari books and lynda... ALL of those record every single action for DRM purposes. the side effect is that now you reading list, how long, what time you read which line etc is all collected and readily available to anyone as we know what happens to all data (from marketers to gov to law enforcement etc)

Right, Elsevier collects analytics on their own services, which has the possibility of being accessed by others, which itself is one concern, however the claim by Fast Company and Fight for the Future was Elsevier somehow surveils broad internet usage outside the scope of their own products.

For this to be true they'd either need their own trackers on every single website online (or be ingesting from those that do but at which point it's not Elsevier's tracking) or be have software/browser addon installed on the clients' system.

Only a small handful of companies have approached the near-ubiquity of webpage presence of the former that made cross-internet tracking a realistic scenario (see eg. past critique of Google/Facebook embeds) but afaict the only thing being interpreted here is a line in a privacy policy that is very likely being misinterpreted.

Certainly the report doesn't make any claim about ubiquitous internet tracking in its key findings summaries. Contrast that to how Fight for the Future has run with it:

> Elsevier tracks more than what books someone reads—it surveils readers’ search and browsing history across the whole web, collects their locations, and builds profiles based on inferences from this data.

DRM by definition is on the client and opaque.

I'm not sure where you are getting all that misplaced goodwill and hopes of lack of capabilities

DRM isn't magic. It's still bound by the browsers' security policies, and those policies do not allow tracking by one domain of activity on others that aren't opting in somehow. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and my pre-existing hatred for Elsevier isn't evidence of them having capabilities that would make the NSA drool.

If students were regularly installing a native app or a browser extension, the tracking claim would make sense, but neither you nor TFA have suggested a valid mechanism for the supposed tracking.

most of those examples don't even have a webapp or website.

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