(2023-12-13) Ebooks Are Fast Becoming Tools Of Corporate Surveillance

E-books are fast becoming tools of corporate surveillance. Three in ten Americans read digital books. Major publishers are giving Big Tech free rein to watch what you read and where, including books on sensitive topics, like if you check out a book on self care after an abortion. Worse, tech and publishing corporations are gobbling up data beyond your reading habits—today, there are no federal laws to stop them from surveilling people who read digital books across the entire internet.

In November, a report from Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) exposed the atrocious privacy practices of the world’s largest publisher, Elsevier. Many students are required to use Elsevier’s digital books and learning products in order to complete coursework. There were over one billion downloads of their e-books and articles in 2021. By default, Elsevier surveils every page a student visits on the internet... Then, their wildly permissive terms of service say they can build profiles on individual students and sell this information to data brokers. 2023-11-07-SparcReportUrgesActionToAddressConcernsWithSciencedirectDataPrivacyPractices

• I'm not convinced that "Elsevier surveils every page a student visits on the internet"
  • other people on the hackernews thread seem equally skeptical
  • Lia Holland is a fiction author and campaigns and communications director at digital rights organization Fight for the Future, where they focus on creator’s rights and emerging technologies. Jade Pfaefflin Bounds is a reproductive and racial justice educator, doula, and digital rights organizer with Fight for the Future. His work converges and orients towards collective liberation. 4 bozo bits flipped. on the writers, FastCo amd FftF.
• update: article has been updated to remove all the Elsevier claims and add a response from Elsevier.
• don't fall prey to Gell-Mann Amnesia

Big Publishing is clearly seeing nothing but dollar signs as apps like Hoopla gobble up identity-linked data on readers