Readium's New Licensed Content Protection May Result in Better Reader Privacy

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Libraries offering ebook lending are between a rock and a hard place. They know in their heart of hearts that digital rights management (DRM) software is evil, but not allowing users to borrow the ebooks they want to read is not exactly the height of virtue. Saintly companies like Amazon will be happy to fill the gaps if libraries can't lend ebooks. The fundamental problem is that "borrowing" is a fiction, a conceptual construct, when applied to the ones and zeroes of a digital book. An ebook loan is really a short-term license. Under today's copyright law, a reader must have a license to read an ebook, and ebook rights-holders don't trust users to adhere to short-term licenses without some sort of software to enforce the license.

Unless the rock becomes a marshmallow, libraries that want to improve the ebook lending experience are hoping to make the hard place a bit softer. The most common DRM system used in libraries is run by Adobe. Adobe Content Server (ACS) is used by Overdrive, Proquest, EBSCO and Bibliotheca's Cloud Library. Adobe Content Server is a hard place for libraries in two ways. First, a payment must be made to Adobe for every lending transaction processed through ACS. Second, use of ACS affects reader privacy. When ACS first came out, Adobe got to know the identity of every borrower. Adobe says this about these records:

"Adobe keeps internet protocol (IP) address logs related to Adobe ID sign-ins for 90 days"

I wish they also said they destroyed these logs. Their privacy policy says:

"Your personal information and files are stored on Adobe’s servers and the servers of companies we hire to provide services to us. Your personal information may be transferred across national borders because we have servers located worldwide and the companies we hire to help us run our business are located in different countries around the world."

... and generally says that reader should trust Adobe to not betray you.

Thanks in part to demand from libraries and the companies that serve them, Adobe changed ACS so that borrower identities could be de-identified by intermediaries such as Overdrive. So instead of relying on Adobe's sometimes lax privacy protections, libraries could rely on vendors more responsive to library concerns. But still, the underlying DRM technology was designed to trust Adobe, and to distrust readers. Its centralized architecture requires everyone to trust participants closer to the center. A reader's privacy requires trust of the library or bookstore, which in turn have to trust a vendor, who in turn have to trust Adobe.

This state of affairs has been the motivation for the Readium Foundation's new DRM technology, called Readium Licensed Content Protection (LCP). LCP's developers claim that it offers libraries a low cost way to improve the library ebook lending experience while providing readers with the privacy assurances they expect from libraries. In addition, Readium describes LCP as Open Source... except for a few lines of code. To understand LCP, and to see if it delivers on the developer's claims, I took a close look at the recently released spec. The short description of what I found is that it can do what it claims to do... but everything depends on the implementation. Also, DRM may be a Hofstadter-Moebius loop.

Now for the longer description:

Every DRM system uses encryption and secrets. Centralized DRM systems such as ACS keep a centralized secret, and use that secret to generate, distribute and control keys that lock and unlock content. LCP takes a somewhat different approach. It uses two secrets to lock and unlock content, a user secret and and ecosystem secret. An "ecosystem" is all the libraries, booksellers, and reading system vendors who agree to interoperate. Any software that knows the ecosystem secret can combine it with a user's secret to unlock content that has been locked for a user. This way multiple content providers in an ecosystem can independently lock content for a user- there's no requirement for a central key server.

The LCP DRM system has some interesting usability and privacy features. If you want to read on several devices, you just need to remember your encryption secret, and you can move files from one device to another. If you want to share an ebook with a family member or close friend, that's ok too, as long as you're comfortable sharing your encryption secret. If you want to read anonymously, can have have a trusted friend borrow the book on your behalf. But to get publisher buy-in for these usability features, the system has to have a way for content providers to limit oversharing. Content providers don't want you to just post the file and the password on a pirate file-sharing service. So ecosystem software applications are required to "phone home" with a device identifier and license identifier when they are connected to the internet.

As you might imagine, the LCP phone-home information could have an impact on reader privacy, depending on the implementation. So for example, if you borrow a book from the library, and your reader app contacts the library to say you've opened the book, your privacy is minimally impacted since the library already knows you borrowed the book. But if the phone-home transaction is unencrypted, or if it contains too much information, then your employer might be able to find out about the union-organizer book you're reading. If the libraries or booksellers can aggregate all their phone-home logs, then your detailed reading profile could be compiled and exploited. Or if users are not permitted to select their own encryption secret, it might be much harder to read a book anonymously. (Note: my suggested changes for improving these parts of the spec were accepted by the spec's authors.) But if everything is implemented with a view to reader privacy, LCP should offer much better reader privacy than possible with existing systems.

There's some bad news, however. Because the ecosystem secret has to be protected, the openness of the reader software is not quite what it seems. The code will need to be obfuscated before distribution, and the secret will only be available to developers and to distribution channels that are willing and able to "harden" their software. If you want to fork the software to add a feature, your build will not be able to unlock ecosystem content until the ecosystem overlords deign to approve your changes. So don't expect reader software with lots of plugins and options. Don't expect a javascript web-reader.

The code obfuscation raises another issue: it will be difficult to audit reader software to make sure it doesn't harbor spyware, even if the source code is open (except for the ecosystem secret). You still have have to trust app provider, your library and the people who sell you books. But it's hard to get far without trusting somebody, so this isn't a new problem, and when was the last time anyone audited library software? And because the ecosystem overlords distribute the ecosystem secrets to trusted developers, the topology of trust and accountability is very different from Adobe's centralized system.

If you didn't like that bad news, that cloud may have a silver lining, or maybe a lead lining, depending on your perspective. If LCP becomes widely used, the ecosystem secret will inevitably leak, and an anti-ecosystem could form. There will be a Calibre plugin to strip encryption. There will be grayware that does everything that the ecosystem software isn't permitted to do. And it might even be sort-of legal to use. Library ebook lending might flourish. Or collapse. Because in the end, ebook lending requires trust to flow in both directions; while it's not perfect, LCP is a baby step in the direction of mutual trust between readers and content providers.

In Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the computer HAL 9000 goes insane. The reason:

HAL's crisis was caused by a programming contradiction: he was constructed for "the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment", yet his orders, directly from Dr. Heywood Floyd at the National Council on Astronautics, required him to keep the discovery of the Monolith TMA-1 a secret for reasons of national security. This contradiction created a "Hofstadter-Moebius loop", reducing HAL to paranoia. 

Readium LCP software is sort of like HAL 9000. It's charged with opening up information to readers, with expanding minds everywhere, transporting them to worlds of new knowledge and imagination, yet it must work to keep a secret and prevent users from doing things that copyright owners don't want them to do. Let's hope that the P in LCP doesn't stand for "Paranoia".

Copyrighted Clickstream Poetry to Stop ISP Click-Selling

Congress won't let the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) protect users from Internet Service Provider (ISP) snooping-for-cash. My ISP could decide to sell a list of all the websites I visit to advertisers, and the FCC can't stop them. I wondered if there was some way I could use copyright law to prevent my ISP from selling copies of my clickstream.

So I invented "clickstream poetry". Here is my first clickstream poem, entitled My clicks are mine:

{
    "content":       
        [
        "https://roses.com",
        "http://are.com",
        "https://reddit.com",
        "http://theultraviolets.net",
        "http://are.com",
        "https://moo.com",
        "http://this.is",
        "http://work.org",
        "http://is.com",
        "https://copyright.com",
        "https://ted.com",
        "https://www.so.ch",
        "http://verizon.com",
        "http://www.faa.gov",
        "https://kyu.com",
        "https://copyright.com",
        "http://2o17.com",
        "http://eric.org",
        "http://hellman.net",
        "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode"
        ],
    "copyright": "2017 Eric Hellman",
    "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode",
    "title": "My clicks are mine"
}

I wrote a python script that "performs" the poem for the benefit of anyone listening to my clickstream. The script requests the websites in the poem in a random order; the listener will see the website names requested, and this dataset comprises the "poem". I used a Creative Commons license that doesn't let anyone distribute copies of my poem for commercial purposes. If my ISP tries to sell a copy of my clickstream, they would be violating the license, and thus infringing my copyright to the poem. If you run the script to perform the poem (for non-commercial purposes, of course), your ISP would similarly be infringing my copyright if they try to sell your clickstream.

If I tried to sue an ISP for copyright infringement, they would likely argue that though my creation is original and used in its entirety, selling my clickstream is a "fair use". They would assert that advertising optimization (or whatever) is a "transformative use" and that it didn't affect the market for my poem. Who would pay anything for a stupid clickstream poem? How would a non-existent, hypothetical market for clickstream poetry be harmed by use in their big data algorithms?

That's why I'm offering commercial licenses to the clickstream poem My clicks are mine. This will demonstrate that a commercial market for clickstream poetry licenses exists. For only $10, you can use a copy of my poem for any purpose whatsoever, for a period of 24 hours. If an ad network wants to use my clickstream to optimize the ads they show me, more power to them, as long as they pay for a license. I imagine that, over the lifetime of my poem's copyright protection (into the 22nd century), clickstream poetry will become increasingly valuable because of uses that haven't been invented yet.

To acquire a commercial license to my poem, support my work at the Free Ebook Foundation, a 501(c)3 not-for-profit corporation, by making a donation. Or don't. I have no idea if a court would take my side against a big company (and against Congress). I'm told that judges are generally skeptical of clever "legal hacks" unless they are crafted by lawyers instead of engineers.

ISPs would probably figure out a legal or technical subterfuge around the copyright of my clickstream poem; but if they have to worry even a little, this effort will have been worth my time.

Update: I have now paid $35 to register my copyright to My clicks are mine.

Reader Privacy for Research Journals is Getting Worse

Ever hear of Grapeshot, Eloqua, Moat, Hubspot, Krux, or Sizmek? Probably not. Maybe you've heard of Doubleclick, AppNexus, Adsense or Addthis? Certainly you've heard of Google, which owns Doubleclick and Adsense. If you read scientific journal articles on publisher websites, these companies that you've never heard of will track and log your reading habits and try to figure out how to get you to click on ads, not just at the publisher websites but also at websites like Breitbart.com and the Huffington Post.

Two years ago I surveyed the websites of 20 of the top research journals and found that 16 of the top 20 journals placed trackers from ad networks on their web sites. Only the journals from the American Physical Society (2 of the 20) supported secure (HTTPS) connections, and even now APS does not default to being secure.

I'm working on an article about advertising in online library content, so I decided to revisit the 20 journals to see if there had been any improvement. Over half the traffic on the internet now uses secure connections, so I expected to see some movement. One of the 20 journals, Quarterly Journal of Economics, now defaults to a secure connection, significantly improving privacy for its readers. Let's have a big round of applause for Oxford University Press! Yay.

So that's the good news. The bad news is that reader privacy at most of the journals I looked at got worse. Science, which could be loaded securely 2 years ago, has reverted to insecure connections. The two Annual Reviews journals I looked at, which were among the few that did not expose users to advertising network tracking, now have trackers for AddThis and Doubleclick. The New England Journal of Medicine, which deployed the most intense reader tracking of the 20, is now even more intense, with 19 trackers on a web page that had "only" 14 trackers two years ago. A page from Elsevier's Cell went from 9 to 16 trackers.

Despite the backwardness of most journal websites, there are a few signs of hope. Some of the big journal platforms have begun to implement HTTPS. Springer Link defaults to HTTPS, and Elsevier's Science Direct is delivering some of its content with secure connections. Both of them place trackers for advertising networks, so if you want to read a journal article securely and privately, your best bet is still to use Tor.

How to enable/disable privacy protection in Google Analytics (it's easy to get wrong!)

In my survey last year of ARL library web services, I found that 72% of them used Google Analytics. So it's not surprising that a common response to my article about leaking catalog searches to Amazon was to wonder whether the same thing is happening with Google Analytics.

The short answer is "It Depends". It might be OK to use Google Analytics on a library search facility, if the following things are true:

1. The library trusts Google on user privacy. (Many do.)
2. Google is acting in good faith to protect user privacy and is not acting under legal compulsion to act otherwise. (We don't really know.)
3. Google Analytics is correctly doing what their documentation says they are doing and not being circumvented by the rest of Google. (They don't always.)
4. The library has implemented Google Analytics correctly to enable user privacy.

There's an entire blog post to write about each of the first three conditions, but I have only so many hours in a day.  Given that many libraries have decided that the benefits using of Google Analytics outweigh the privacy risks, the rest of this post concerns only this last condition. Of the 72% of ARL libraries that use Google Analytics, I find that only 19% of them have implemented Google Analytics with privacy-protection features enabled.

So, if you care about library privacy but can't do without Google Analytics, read on!

Google Analytics has a lot of configuration options, which is why webmasters love it. For the purposes of user privacy, however, there are just two configuration options to pay attention to, the "IP Anonymization" option and the "Display Features" option.

IP Anonymization says to Google Analytics "please don't remember the exact IP address of my users". According to Google, enabling this mode masks the least significant bits of the user's IP address before the IP address is used or saved. Since many users can be identified by their IP address, this prevents anyone from discovering the search history for a given IP address. But remember, Google is still sent the IP address, and we have to trust that Google will obscure the IP address as advertised, and not save it in some log somewhere. Even with the masked IP address, it may still be possible to identify a user, particularly if a library serves a small number of geographically dispersed users.

"Display Features" says to Google to that you don't care about user privacy, and it's OK to track your users all to hell so that you can get access to "demographic" information. To understand what's happening, it's important to understand the difference between "first-party" and "third-party" cookies, and how they implicate privacy differently.

Out of the box, Google Analytics uses "first party" cookies to track users. So if you deploy Google Analytics on your "library.example.edu" server, the tracking cookie will be attached to the library.example.edu hostname. Google Analytics will have considerable difficulty connecting user number 1234 on the library.example.edu domain with user number 5678 on the "sci-hub.info" domain, because the user ids are chosen randomly for each hostname. But if you turn on Display Features, Google will connect the two user ids via a third party tracking cookie from its Doubleclick advertising service. This enables both you and Google to know more about your users. Anyone with access to Google's data will be able to connect the catalog searches saved for user number 1234 to that user's searches on any website that uses Google advertising or any site that has Display Features turned on.

IP Anonymization and Display Features can be configured in Google Analytics in three ways, depending on how it's being configured. The instructions here apply to the "Universal Analytics" script. You can tell a site uses Universal Analytics because the pages execute a javascript named "analytics.js". An older "classic" version of Google Analytics uses a script named "ga.js"; its configuration is similar to that of Universal. More complex websites may use Google Tag Manager to deploy and configure Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is usually deployed on a web page by inserting a script element that looks like this:

<script>
    (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
    (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
    m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
    })(window,document,'script','https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');
    ga('create', 'UA-XXXXX-Y', 'auto');
    ga('send', 'pageview');
</script>

IP Anonymization and Display Features are turned on with extra lines in the script:

    ga('create', 'UA-XXXXX-Y', 'auto');
    ga('require', 'displayfeatures');  // starts tracking users across sites
    ga('set', 'anonymizeIp', true); // makes it harder to identify the user from logs
    ga('send', 'pageview');

The Google Analytics Admin allows you to turn on cross site user tracking, though the privacy impact of what you're doing is not made clear . In the "Data Collection" item of the Tracking info pane, look at the toggle switches for "Remarketing" and "Advertising Reporting Features" if these are switched to "ON", then you've enabled cross site tracking and your users can expect no privacy.

Turning on IP anonymization is not quite as easy and turning on cross-site tracking. You have to add it explicitly in your script or turn it on in Google tag manager (where you won't find it unless you know what to look for!).

To check if cross-site tracking has been turned on in your institution's Google Analytics, use the procedures I described in my article on How to check if your library is leaking catalog searches to Amazon.  First, clear the cookies for your website, then load your site and look at the "Sources" tab in Chrome developer tools. If there's a resource from "stats.g.doubleclick.net", then your website is asking google to track your users across sites. If your institution is a library, you should not be telling Google to track your users across sites.

Bottom line: if you use Google Analytics, always remember that Google is fundamentally an advertising company and it will seldom guide you towards protecting your users' privacy.

Policy-based Privacy is Over

Yesterday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to enhance "Public Safety in the Interior of the United States".

Of interest here is section 14:

Sec. 14.  Privacy Act.  Agencies shall, to the extent consistent with applicable law, ensure that their privacy policies exclude persons who are not United States citizens or lawful permanent residents from the protections of the Privacy Act regarding personally identifiable information.  

What this means is that the executive branch, including websites, libraries and information systems may not use privacy policies to protect users other than US citizens and green card holders. Since websites, libraries and information systems typically don't keep track of user citizen status, this makes it very difficult to have any privacy policy at all.

Note that this executive order does not apply to the Library of Congress, an organ of the legislative branch of the US government. Nevertheless, it demonstrates the vulnerability of policy-based privacy. Who's to say that Congress won't enact the same restrictions for the legislative branch? Who's to say that Congress won't enact the same restrictions on any website. library or information system that operates in multiple states?

Lawyering privacy won't work any more. Librarianing privacy won't work any more. We need to rely on engineers to build privacy into our websites, libraries and information systems. This is possible. Engineers have tools such as strong cryptography that allow privacy to be built into systems without compromising functionality. It's not that engineers are immune from privacy-breaking mandates, but it's orders of magnitude more difficult to outlaw privacy engineering than it is to invalidate privacy policies. A system that doesn't record what a user does can't produce user activity records. Some facts are not alternativable. Math trumps Trump.