From: Eric Hellman <[log in to unmask]> Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 12:54:03 -0400 As a followup to this thread from february, I note that "AddThis", one of the third party services used by University of Chicago Press (and many others), turns out to be notorious for "Canvas Fingerprinting"; its social share function has been recently described as a Trojan-horse tracking device. It uses a javascript fingerprinting method that tracks you even if you have cookies turned off! Here's the article from ProPublica: http://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-online-tracking-device-that-is-virtually-impossible-to-block And a follow-on discussion from Princeton CITP: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/englehardt/the-hidden-perils-of-cookie-syncing/ Back in February, I chose University of Chicago Press to look at pretty much at random; so please don't single them out, as I'm sure many publishers and even many libraries make use of AddThis. But I hope lots of organizations take a second look at the third party services they use to see if they're routinely giving away the user-privacy store. Eric Eric Hellman President, Gluejar.Inc. Founder, Unglue.it https://unglue.it/ http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/ twitter: @gluejar On Feb 4, 2014, at 6:46 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote: From: Eric Hellman <[log in to unmask]> Date: Tue, 4 Feb 2014 09:48:53 -0500 Joe, You need to learn how to use Chrome's Developer tools. I'm willing to bet that there aren't any university presses in the US that aren't using cookies in some way, although perhaps they don't realize that they're doing it. As a representative example (not to pick on them, or anything) University of Chicago Press uses Google Analytics on its web site, which uses 4 cookies to track users across the website. It also uses "scorecard research" which sets 3 more cookies. It uses previews from google books- 10 more cookies. It uses "Addthis.com". Another 12 cookies. If I add to the shopping cart, I get 12 cookies from uchicago.edu itself. So yeah, the people you've been talking to have no clue about cookies. Eric Eric Hellman President, Gluejar.Inc. Founder, Unglue.it https://unglue.it/ http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/ twitter: @gluejar On Feb 2, 2014, at 6:27 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote: One hypothesis I had when I started out was that U. presses could have trouble selling D2C because of privacy policies of the parent institutions (that is, commercial organizations have fewer scruples about collecting user data). Now I am beginning to think I formulated this question all wrong. It's my understanding, based on a number of interviews with U. press personnel, that presses collect little user data and don't distribute it often or widely. I have stumbled on no academic book publisher yet that places cookies on users' computers, which significantly reduces the amount of information a publisher could collect. Have I simply been talking to the wrong people?