The pdf is about the economics of user-generated content. Nothing top-secret. Disruptive yes, but not subversive. I downloaded it in the usual way. I use a Mac, so the default pdf viewer is Preview. I couldn’t look at it with Preview because Preview wouldn’t link to a privacy notice that I had to agree to. I couldn’t just agree without reading what I was agreeing to (well I didn’t really read it, who does, but I opened the page and skimmed it).
So I opened the pdf with Adobe Acrobat Professional, and could now access the web page with the privacy policy. It wasn’t made clear why I needed to agree to the policy, and looked like a pretty usual privacy policy, so I clicked “agree”. Pretty soon I had to agree again, so I checked a box that said “remember this action on this site”. Which turned out to be useful, because the pdf calls back to the mothership once a minute.
That is really annoying. A dialog box flashes in front of what I read, every minute. Interrupts my concentration, pisses me off. And for what?
Is this the future of “protected” pdfs? Will we need to hire a lawyer every time we want to view them?
Well, I’m about to get back into writing my term paper on Open Access journals. May they take over the world.
Tags: Acrobat, OECD, Open Access, pdf, Preview, privacy policy, protected pdf, user-generated content
June 9, 2008 at 7:50 pm |
OECD PDFs are not protected and never have been. What you’re seeing here (and I apologise if we didn’t make it clear enough) is an experiment we’re running with some embedded software which gives us some feedback on the frequency with which PDFs are opened and which pages are being read. The privacy notice you saw tries to explain this. It also gives you the ability to say no, I don’t want my reading to be included in the experiment. For those who accept to join the experiment, their reading remains private because we don’t know who is doing the reading. All we know is that someone opens the file x times and reads x, y and z pages. We are running the experiment on just two of our e-books (we’ve got around 4,000 e-books available). The results from the experiment are interesting, but don’t give us much more insight than we can already learn from monitoring downloads.
June 9, 2008 at 8:49 pm |
Thanks Toby. Adobe Acrobat Professional said the pdf was protected. I was using that rather than reader, because I had to open another file with it previously.
I had no idea it was an experiment – that should have been right at the top, first thing. I’m not a big fan of Jakob Nielsen, but his “inverted pyramids in cyberspace” principle is essential reading for anyone writing for the web. Next should have been the bit about it being OK to refuse. I am so used to EULAs, where if you click disagree you don’t get to use your software. It seemed like another one of those forced agreements (which nobody reads, except Fred Von Lohmann – he said that). That full privacy statement had to be there, no doubt, but a summary at the top contextualising it should have been there too. Otherwise, you can’t really call it informed consent.
But above all, did it have to be so intrusive? I don’t care if you know what I read. If that dialog hadn’t flashed in front of me every minute, I wouldn’t have blogged about it. I’m glad I did though. I’m impressed that you found my post and took the trouble to reply.