Opinion: New metrics-gathering system is smart business for the people who use the technology, but it opens the door to potential dark days for PDF documents.Like many people, I'm sick of giving up my phone number, my e-mail address, and DNA samples, and/or dragging around a "rewards card" just in order to see a lousy extra paragraph of an article on the Web, to get 10 percent off my car's oil change, or—and this one positively kills me—to get the uninflated, normal price for a grocery item at the supermarket.
Seems like every company with which we cross paths in our daily lives needs a piece of us, a marker, in order to justify its marketing investment. For many companies, though, it stops there: It's enough to be able to sell something to us just that once, or to get us to look at one Web page with ads.
Other companies prefer to impose on our privacy, by watching us and then, at some future point, messaging us via paper or the Web. A little eavesdropping is OK if it turns a buck—or, more likely, a fraction of a cent—right? Good old capitalism, sale ends this weekend.
Still others choose more benign—yet creepy—ways of keeping tabs on us. Ever try, say, to delete or close an Apple iTunes Music Store account? You can't. It's not possible. Don't believe it? Try. Apple will send you an e-mail that says:
"Thank you for contacting the iTunes Music Store. If you do not intend to make future purchases from the iTunes Music Store, you can simply sign out and your account will remain idle. At present, it is not possible to cancel an account."
Sure, you can turn off displaying the iTunes Store in your iTunes application. But just as those 16 different versions of "Hotel California" there waiting for download at the iTunes Store put it, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
Thank goodness the PDFs we download and pass around don't come impregnated with some tracking technology that is generating metrics information back at the server.
At least, until last Thursday they didn't.
Toronto software company Remote Approach now offers subscribers access to its Map-Bot, a tool to track traffic in PDFs much the same way Web sites collect IP addresses and other data from their visitors.
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.
While other companies such as Adobe offer more expensive and elaborate tracking software that does some of the same things, Remote Approach alone has the power to spread among the masses with its simple, low-cost (starting at $9.95 a month), subscription-based service administered over the Web.
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Is it spyware? No. Map-Bot accesses no information from the user's computer and leaves no software behind. In fact, at its heart, this is a great idea. Remote Approach is just doing business by filling a market niche where it hopes one might exist—capitalism in action.
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. Sure, from time to time a virus crops up that can be transmitted via PDF. But PDF is nothing like e-mail in that regard. PDF advocates also love to talk about airtight document security. If privacy is your concern, do it with PDF, they say.
Remote Approach, however, is the beginning of a movement that could chip away at PDF's sterling rep, one document at a time. Sure, PDF will always look better printed on paper than HTML or e-mail, and granted, the chances of running into a Remote Approach PDF right now—and in the near future—are pretty remote.
But the potential for the technology to tarnish PDF's image is staggering. 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.
If Remote Approach's idea takes off, competitors with less innocent designs—such as collecting e-mail addresses—could jump in beside them. All of a sudden, some PDFs we download could come with nasty little bots attached that can generate spam. Not all of them, just enough to give us pause … sort of the way we now look at e-mail attachments with a jaundiced eye, even when they come from well-meaning friends.
Too much of this stuff, and PDF becomes a lead-generation device for commercial interests and not a beloved publishing platform. In other words, it will be vulnerable to the same problems as Web pages and e-mail, and suddenly not such a great value proposition.
Let's not go there.
Don Fluckinger is a freelance writer based in Nashua, N.H., who has covered Acrobat and PDF technologies for PDFzone since 2000.
