Show HN: Check who, when and how is viewing your PDF • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Check who, when and how is viewing your PDF

#11

Post by Rainymood » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 2:13 PM UTC

jasekt wrote: post #8

Rainymood wrote: post #4

Really cool, really creepy. Best of luck, I guess? I think it's kind of unsettling someone could track where I'm reading on a PDF ...

Our tracking feature is a kind of a website analytics tool tailored for PDF usage. When interacting with companies you can safely assume that you are being tracked and analysed. We are adding another layer that gives companies additional information, potentially making your life a little bit easier. Of course one can argue it can be misused. We have tried to mitigate it by branding PDF viewer and being open about it.

>Our tracking feature is a kind of a website analytics tool tailored for PDF usage. When interacting with companies you can safely assume that you are being tracked and analysed. We are adding another layer that gives companies additional information, potentially making your life a little bit easier. Of course one can argue it can be misused. We have tried to mitigate it by branding PDF viewer and being open about it.

>When interacting with companies you can safely assume that you are being tracked and analysed.

Welcome to the new normal ... I realize this is standard practice under the veil of "increasing customer satisfaction using large scale data analysis" but it still feels iffy if stated explicitly.

Re: Show HN: Check who, when and how is viewing your PDF

#12

Post by chatmasta » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 7:24 PM UTC

jasekt wrote: post #9

timvdalen wrote: post #6

I wanted to find our how you were tracking live results when viewing (as it turns out, a JS PDF viewer) but found the requirement of entering an email address to be a big hurdle. It might make sense to have a demo where people can see how the PDF viewer works (so they know what they'll be sending their clients) before requiring them to give out their information.

Thank you for your feedback. We thought that it would be best if you test it with your own file. In that case we need to send you link to analytics in case you want to remove pdf from our servers. Your suggestion seems to have potential to considerably lower friction. We will look into it, thanks.

You could just delete files created with no email after a few hours.

Re: Show HN: Check who, when and how is viewing your PDF

#13

Post by gmemstr » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 11:11 PM UTC

I really want to use this - I run a school student newsletter and would love to be able to see how people are reading it. Unfortunately I'd want to host this on my own server that I already have set up serving the PDFs with some small PHP scripts and Caddy. Any options for this use case?