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PDF Tracking On the Way

Posted by timothy on from the drown-baby-in-the-bathwater dept.

(el)Capitan.Nick writes "PDFzone reports that the company Remote Approach has launched a service to track the movement of PDF documents with its tool Map-Bot. The purpose of this service is to allow PDF publishers the ability to measure their audience, as web publishers can already. Though personal information is not gathered from machines, IP addresses are. PDFs can require users to be connected to the Internet in order to read them, and every person you email the PDF to is subject to the service. As PDFzone's opinion article states, while 'the chances of running into a Remote Approach PDF right now -- and in the near future -- are pretty remote ... the potential for the technology to tarnish PDF's image [of security] is staggering.'"

3 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. But how will you know? by JoeBuck · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Disabling Javascript will keep the tracking from working, but if you don't, the transmission is completely invisible to you. It will look like normal HTTP traffic to your firewall.

  2. IP harvesting by Douglas+Simmons · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I'm going to try to present this in a non-paranoid tinfoil hat mentality: I could see this being a great feature if I were in the PDF sending business for marketing purposes or whatever. Now if I were in the FBI/CIA business, this would be great to use, for example, to proliferate PDFs on Kazaa with filenames/tags suggesting they contain info on how to make bombs or blueprints to the Pentagon so that I could collect IPs of whoever's interested in this type of stuff. You see where I'm going with that.

    Also, I definitely do not want to risk exposing my static IP to anyone, especially in a way that involves new technology that may be quite exploitable, just by clicking on a PDF link on google. I'm sorry but c'mon, that's just too much. Nevertheless, assuming the technology is viable, there'll be a demand that will outweigh objection for this new feature and Adobe will do it and make more money.

  3. Re:As much as it pains me to say this... by akzeac · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Websites only collect the IP of the machine that downloaded the page. This technology would distributors to collect the IP of every machine in which the PDF is *viewed*.

    On the evil side, getting on the conspiration mood, it would also allow the FBI or the gov to diffund pseudo-dissident bait documents and then check and track anyone who reads it, anywhere he reads it.