Welcome to Hotel Elsevier: you can check-out any time you like … not - Eiko Fried | May 9, 2022

peter.suber's bookmarks 2022-05-09

Summary:

"Luckily, folks over at Elsevier “take your privacy and trust in [them] very seriously”, so we used the Elsevier Privacy Support Hub to start an “access to personal information” request. Being in the EU, we are legally entitled under the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to ask Elsevier what data they have on us, and submitting this request was easy and quick. After a few weeks, we both received responses by email. We had been assigned numbers 0000034 and 0000272 respectively, perhaps implying that relatively few people have made use of this system yet. The emails contained several files with a wide range of our data, in different formats. One of the attached excel files had over 700,000 cells of data, going back many years, exceeding 5mb in file size. We want to talk you through a few examples of what Elsevier knows about us.... To start with, of course they have information we have provided them with in our interactions with Elsevier journals: full names, academic affiliations, university e-mail addresses, completed reviews and corresponding journals, times when we declined review requests, and so on. Apart from this, there was a list of IP addresses. Checking these IP addresses identified one of us in the small city we live in, rather than where our university is located. We also found several personal user IDs, which is likely how Elsevier connects our data across platforms and accounts. We were also surprised to see multiple (correct) private mobile phone numbers and e-mail addresses included.... And there is more. Elsevier tracks which emails you open, the number of links per email clicked, and so on.... We also found our personal address and bank account details, probably because we had received a small payment for serving as a statistical reviewer1. These €55 sure came with a privacy cost larger than anticipated. Data called “Web Traffic via Adobe Analytics” appears to list which websites we visited, when, and from which IP address. “ScienceDirect Usage Data” contains information on when we looked at which papers, and what we did on the corresponding website. Elsevier appears to distinguish between downloading or looking at the full paper and other types of access, such as looking at a particular image (e.g. “ArticleURLrequestPage”, “MiamiImageURLrequestPage”, and “MiamiImageURLreadPDF”), although it’s not entirely clear from the data export. This leads to a general issue that will come up more often in this piece: while Elsevier shared what data they have on us, and while they know what the data mean, it was often unclear for us navigating the data export what the data mean. In that sense, the usefulness of the current data export is, at least in part, questionable. In the extreme, it’s a bit like asking google what they know about you and they send you a file full of special characters that have no meaning to you...."    

Link:

https://eiko-fried.com/welcome-to-hotel-elsevier-you-can-check-out-any-time-you-like-not/

From feeds:

[IOI] Open Infrastructure Tracking Project » Items tagged with oa.analytics in Open Access Tracking Project (OATP)
[IOI] Open Infrastructure Tracking Project » Items tagged with oa.elsevier in Open Access Tracking Project (OATP)
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.privacy oa.new oa.elsevier oa.data oa.analytics oa.elsevier

Date tagged:

05/09/2022, 09:16

Date published:

05/09/2022, 05:15