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PDF Tracking On the Way

Posted by timothy on Sat Apr 02, 2005 05:05 PM
from the drown-baby-in-the-bathwater dept.
Privacy
(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.'"
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  • Advertisements! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Eric(b0mb)Dennis (629047) on Saturday April 02 2005, @05:06PM (#12121886)
    Oh.. soon as they can track views of PDFs, people will start putting ads in them... I guarentee it!

    I can see it now.. Google introduces AdWords for PDFs...
          • I also choose not to buy content with DRM "strings" attached, such as PDF files...

            By the way, PDF is an open format. There are MANY non-Adobe applications, some of them open source (many not), that both read and write PDF files.

            • "I spend time and money making content and I pay the bills just fine without DRM."

              Sad or not, good or bad, YOU do not represent the VAST majority of content producers

              But HE understands the position of the VAST majority of content consumers, which is more important. Whichever content producers do not understand this are going to suffer pain. Much pain. Try this little experiment: think to yourself "who is king?"

              If the thought popped into your head "the customer is king!" then you are well on the way

      • Evil, explained (Score:4, Insightful)

        by hummassa (157160) on Sunday April 03 2005, @05:25AM (#12125533) Homepage Journal
        Q: How does this tracking mechanism differ from web log analysers?

        A: Simple, web log analysers aren't capable of tracking redistributions of the same document. If you copy a web page, say about theories in free-market macroeconomics, and e-mail the copy to a friend, say in China, no one will ever know your friend has read it. But if you copy one of those and it's read by your friend there, then certainly your friend will have a red flag (pun intended) on him.

        HTH

  • Simple... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rolan (20257) * on Saturday April 02 2005, @05:08PM (#12121896) Homepage Journal
    It's simple... Refuse to read PDFs that require the technology. Publishers won't get any data from it, and given a loud enough voice, will find that the tool reduces their distribution. It does them no good if the users won't read their documents because of it.

    • Re:Simple... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thedillybar (677116) on Saturday April 02 2005, @05:14PM (#12121939)
      >It's simple... Refuse to read PDFs that require the technology.

      You'd have trouble convincing more than about 2% of users to refuse.

      >Publishers won't get any data from it

      Sure they will. You will be the one getting no data because you're holding out when no one else cares.

      It's a wonderful idea, but it simply won't happen without government intervention...and who wants that?

      • I doubt what you say is true. PDF I would imagine are used a lot more by the business community than the general public. IN any event the format is in heavy use in the business community.

        I don't see the business community accepting applications phoning home when they see fit. My company wouldn't. Would IBM, Sun, Motorola, Toyota? Doubtful.
      • >It's simple... Refuse to read PDFs that require the technology.
        You'd have trouble convincing more than about 2% of users to refuse.

        No, simply block out connection to the tracking protocol. If Personal Internet firewalls were not so dufus designed they would make it easy to say 'this program has no business connecting to the Internet, silently disable all connection attempts without notice'.

        IE has the same bug in the active X scheme. There should be an option that allows downloading of active-x com

        • I'm pretty sure you can adjust your security policy to disallow untrusted activex downloads, along with a lot of other crap.
        • [S]imply block out connection to the tracking protocol. If Personal Internet firewalls were not so dufus designed they would make it easy to say 'this program has no business connecting to the Internet, silently disable all connection attempts without notice'.

          The point was that the PDF would not be displayed if the tracking server could not be contacted. If you blocked the outgoing connection, you now have a useless PDF.

          Or did I misread something in your argument...

    • Sure, that works (Score:5, Insightful)

      by John Jorsett (171560) on Saturday April 02 2005, @05:16PM (#12121951)
      It's simple... Refuse to read PDFs that require the technology.

      Just like I can shop elsewhere if I don't like being captured on a store's video surveillance camera. Except that they ALL have cameras. If there's no true alternative, you're screwed. Am I going to forego opening that online manual that I desperately need to troubleshoot a problem? I don't think so. A better solution is for some enterprising hackers to find a way to break this technology.

      • Re:Sure, that works (Score:5, Funny)

        by John Hasler (414242) on Saturday April 02 2005, @06:30PM (#12122448)
        > Just like I can shop elsewhere if I don't like
        > being captured on a store's video surveillance
        > camera.

        Yes. You can. Contrary to common belief, your choices are not limited to Walmart and Kmart.
    • Or use a firewall with packet inspection to block any outgoing connections.

      I realise that for a lot of users this would result in "just another thing to click yes to syndrome" but if enough people use it, it would make the data gathered pretty useless.

      BTW, if you've got a Mac and value your privacy you should get Little Snitch [obdev.at] (no affiliation) to do exactly this.

    • But how will you know? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by JoeBuck (7947) on Saturday April 02 2005, @05:21PM (#12121985) Homepage
      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.
    • This seems a bit similar to the massive boycot of crappy microsoft software we have now. We know from this that people really care about the quality of the products they are using.

      In reality people wouldn't even think a second before opening a pdf that includes some tracking software, all they care about it reading the contents, doube click and there you go. The only thing that stop this is a message that damages the image of pdf i.e. the big media labeling pdf as spyware, which it seems to become if this

    • Re:Simple... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by j1m+5n0w (749199) on Saturday April 02 2005, @05:46PM (#12122140) Homepage Journal
      It's simple... Refuse to read PDFs that require the technology.

      Better than that, refuse to use pdf viewers that implement this "feature". (Does anyone know which those are? Without knowing, I would assume Adobe acrobat reader probably does and xpdf probably does not. Does anyone have more specific/accurate information?)

  • As much as it pains me to say this... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ral315 (741081) on Saturday April 02 2005, @05:08PM (#12121899)
    How is it any different from collecting the I.P. of everyone who visits your website?

  • Okay.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Balthisar (649688) on Saturday April 02 2005, @05:08PM (#12121900) Homepage
    Okay... Print, Save as PDF on the Mac, or Print, select PDF Writer on Windows, or print to ps and "distill" with gs on anything else, and there goes the tracking. Not right?
    • On Mac OS X, Acrobat's "Save as PDF" in the Print dialog is disabled (just try to click on it). I presume you have to use Preview, but I don't think Preview supports Javascript anyways.
      • Correct me if I am wrong but, I believe that these features rely on the reader for enforcement. That means that readers such as Ghost Script can ignore the "feature". This makes them non-trackable, printable and copyable, no?

          • Re:Okay.... (Score:5, Informative)

            by Lehk228 (705449) on Saturday April 02 2005, @06:15PM (#12122318) Journal
            ghostscript can read encrypted PDF's, however it does honor the creator settings for disabled features, you will have to go in and recompile it with whatever function checking if it is set to disable features to always return no features disabled.

  • A Day Late (Score:3, Funny)

    by Copperhead (187748) <talbrech@@@speakeasy...net> on Saturday April 02 2005, @05:09PM (#12121907) Homepage
    It's April 2nd already! Stop with the unbelievable stories...

    Oh, wait...

  • Mmm.. sounds like PDFs are ripe for 'sploiting (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Let me see.. how about a DoS attack.. spam a PDF to a bunch of people and have the PDF phone home to a site you wish to attack. Or... can we run arbitrary code from PDFs?

  • Disable PDF Javascript (Score:5, Informative)

    by user9918277462 (834092) on Saturday April 02 2005, @05:10PM (#12121920) Journal
    The remote logging is done through embedded Javascript in the PDF file. Most free viewers such as gpdf, xpdf and kpdf don't support Javascript so you're safe with them.

    Adobe Acrobat Reader starting supporting embedded Javascript with version 7.0, although you can disable it in the preferences dialog. Apparently it bugs you every time you start the program to re-enable it, though.

    Bottom line: Stick with free software.
    • Article [lwn.net] is subscribers only (worthwhile)
    • Article will be readable by guests 1 week after publishing
    • Solution in Linux is to disable Javascript in acroread 7

    • There is a bug (in my opinion) in Acrobat Reader 7 when you disable JavaScript that causes this warning to appear when exiting the program:

      This document contains JavaScripts. Do you want to enable JavaScripts from now on? This document may not behave correctly if they're disabled.

      This happens even if you do not have a document loaded, since Adobe Reader tries to run some internal JavaScripts when it exits. If JavaScript is disabled, this warning comes up. I've created patches [k-lug.org] that prevent this from happening on both Linux and Windows. They may also prevent the warning from coming up with documents that actually contain JavaScript.

  • Rather pointless (Score:5, Informative)

    by hweimer (709734) on Saturday April 02 2005, @05:17PM (#12121958) Homepage
    PDFs can require users to be connected to the Internet in order to read them,

    No, they can't, PDF is nothing but a data format. Some broken PDF viewers (especially those from Adobe) may do this, but since PDF is an open format, there will always be some other viewers that don't promote spying on their users. Basically, this is the same nonsense as the "no printing" option.

    • Re:Rather pointless (Score:4, Informative)

      by NetNifty (796376) on Saturday April 02 2005, @05:22PM (#12122002) Homepage
      Depends how it's done though, if it just plain PDF but with javascript as has been suggested so far, then you are correct.

      However, if for example the document is encrypted and they key is on a server which the PDF points to (and the server logs all IP addresses connecting to it to retrieve the key) then it will work at least for the first time you open it (unless of course we create another server or even p2p network with the keys on it for ebooks which the PDF viewer visits instead).
    • From the article text:

      "A user uploads the PDF they want to track to Remote Approach, assigning variables like 'distribution channels' and 'groups' to add additional detail to the data captured. From there, they can download and distribute the PDF as desired," said John Bielby, president of Remote Approach Inc.

      "Every time the PDF is read, it briefly interacts with the reporting repository to record the event. The user has access to live reports and data to see reports on views, distribution by channel or

    • Basically, this is the same nonsense as the "no printing" option.

      I've found that ps2pdf from the ghostscript package is useful in this situation. If you try saving a PDF with document restrictions as a PostScript file, it embeds some extra code in the PostScript file. This code has a stern warning that removing the code is illegal, and it causes ps2pdf to not work right. However, ps2pdf also happily accepts PDF files as input, it doesn't check the document restrictions, and all of the features are allo

  • They should make another file extension (Score:5, Insightful)

    by saskboy (600063) on Saturday April 02 2005, @05:20PM (#12121978) Homepage Journal
    Rather than tarnish the PDF name, they should create the Tracked Document Format or TDF and that way users can distinguish between the two. To make people suspicious of PDF right after versions 5 and 6.0 were found to contain security holes, this will be bad for Adobe.
  • Thankfully, if Adobe wants to, they could change their Acrobat license agreement to ban this sort of crap.

    • Re:Thankfully (Score:4, Informative)

      by GigsVT (208848) on Saturday April 02 2005, @05:34PM (#12122063) Journal
      Not likely, the last change to the PDF license was the ludricrous requirement that all those who implement PDF also implement the "evil bit".. that is the useless tags that forbid you from printing/saving/etc in acrobat (reader).

      No one else paid attention to it. Since earlier versions of the spec didn't have the requirement, there's no way they can enforce it. Other than that stupid requirement, the spec has an open and free license.

      Besides, only Adobe products implement javascript in PDFs to start with, so Adobe brought this on themselves. No other reader will allow this to happen.

  • IP harvesting (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Douglas Simmons (628988) on Saturday April 02 2005, @05:25PM (#12122022) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:IP harvesting (Score:4, Informative)

      by MntlChaos (602380) on Sunday April 03 2005, @12:55AM (#12124644)
      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

      Wait a minute... clicking on ANY link on Google exposes your static IP to the content provider anyway.

  • Slippery slope argument (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sanityspeech (823537) on Saturday April 02 2005, @05:28PM (#12122027) Journal
    The editor's take on the story makes it seem rather benign. However, the actual story makes it sound more alarming:
    Are Your PDFs Spying on You?
    Like Adobe Policy Server, Remote Approach can FORCE users to be connected to the Web in order to read the documents. It can track who's e-mailing your PDFs to whom, and what they're reading. Real-time. (Emphasis mine)

    FORCE me to go online??? I just hope that technical papers never use this tool.

    Denizens of the PDF world, however, take note. We enjoy--and sell--the differences between PDF, e-mail and HTML, and a lot of those differences are in the realm of security...

    Remote Approach, however, is the beginning of a movement that could chip away at PDF's sterling rep, one document at a time...

    Since the Map-Bot can chase a PDF through e-mail forwarding, it's more powerful data mining than that associated with Web pages, where the vital information gets thrown out when the user's cache is emptied.

    One would think they would come up with a better name than Map-BOT!!!

    Pretty damning, if I may say so.

  • Acrobat is trouble, how about Foxit? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bigberk (547360) <bigberk@users.pc9.org> on Saturday April 02 2005, @05:41PM (#12122108)
    As others pointed out, this potential for a security breach occurs of embedded javascript in a PDF document. Adobe's reader is vulnerable by default. Does anyone know whether Foxit [foxitsoftware.com] (a totally free PDF reader for Windows) is safer?

  • Refuse to read PDF's, period. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AtariAmarok (451306) on Saturday April 02 2005, @05:46PM (#12122139)
    PDF's are great for printing, but not as easy to view on the Internet as regular html files. The Google "viwe as html" tool will help greatly.

  • Just one more reason (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Peaker (72084) <[gnupeaker] [at] [yahoo.com]> on Saturday April 02 2005, @05:53PM (#12122165) Homepage
    That PDF sucks. Use HTML.
    • That PDF sucks. Use HTML. well, html also has javascript; it can also track you. actually just by including a remote image in html you can be tracked, no javascript required, though i'm not sure if pdfs can use remote images about what kind of network connections can be produced to verify certificates. though i must say that i am rather supprised that standard pdfs(adobes reader) allows for this, when i(and assume many others too) see a pdf i see a document, a standardized text file, not something with a

  • A little technical info (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2005, @05:56PM (#12122183)
    Ok, so I downloaded the demo document, and captured the packets.
    There's a POST to remoteapproach.com (you could block all traffic going to remoteapproach.com, or just repoint remoteapproach.com to 127.0.0.1 or something in your hosts file.
    The POST message looks like:
    POST /remoteapproach/logging.asp?type=view&DocID=123456 7890&GroupID=123456789&ChannelID=123456789 HTTP/1.1

    The thing that gets me is that the content of the request also contains this:
    1 0 obj]/F(/C/Documents and Settings/Administrator/Desktop/MBRemote Approach Manual.pdf)>>>>

    As you can see, it contains the full system path to the file that I opened. This seems like a big privacy issue. After all, Acrobat didn't ASK if it could open the URL.

    The .PDF files can be opened with Ghostscript, and (obviously) do not send tracking information. Simply re-saving the document as PDF doesn't remove the tracking, but converting it (File--Convert) via pdfwrite APPEARS to remove the tracking.

    Some technology.

  • Open Acrobat (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby (173196) on Saturday April 02 2005, @06:36PM (#12122494) Homepage Journal
    My Windows firewall asks for permission for Acrobat Reader to access the Net all the time, and I always deny it. With no effect on the documents. They better not make that connection required, or I'll drop Acrobat entirely, for a snitchfree open alternative. PDF is an open format, with real alternative apps - Adobe would drive people into the arms of their open competition if they required such spyware.
      • What's so stupid about asking whether some doc reader should open a connection to the Net? That's exactly *why* I use the firewall. I could set it to always deny, but I want some apps to notify me when they ask for access, like Acrobat, IE, various Windows processes. Since they're too sneaky to notify me, I have the firewall do it. Just because *you* don't know what your apps are doing, doesn't mean that they're safe.

  • another DRM defeated by the shift key (Score:3, Informative)

    by gblues (90260) on Saturday April 02 2005, @07:06PM (#12122705)
    As a long-time user of Acrobat, I know you can disable plugins (which includes JavaScript) by holding the Shift key at the splash screen. Just hold Shift while opening the PDF, and voila.

    Nice try, though!

    Nathan

  • Nothing new. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mystik (38627) on Saturday April 02 2005, @07:08PM (#12122724) Homepage Journal
    There is nothing new about this. We've been (unfortunatly) using 3rd party document encryptor to protect some of our client's documents. Users require a plugin installed, but the document is actually encrypted, no javascript involved.

    The document can be configured to ping the server every time any action on the document is performed. (Printing, opening, etc). The server can decide to deny any action too.

    It does support a one-time-online-to-authorize mode (much like Windows Actvation), but that's about it.

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