Do ISP and library know what we read when we borrow books from platforms, such as Overdrive, with public library accounts? p.s. first post + app glitch can’t enter new line.
Http is known as plain text transport. Anyone looking at the traffic can see what is going on, can see your passwords, authentication tokens, credit card numbers, text of the web page.
HTTPS uses encryption, when you first access a page with HTTPS your application and the server set up a secure channel to transfer whatever you are doing and only your application and the web server have the secrets to decrypt the traffic.
Now ISP will know you accessed an IP that may be hosting the library website, but unless they are doing legal or illegal interception they will not know what book you are looking at or what file you download.
IPs are shard between many sites so just because the IP hosts the library, it may also host a cooking blog and/or a car yard website.
Allthough not a pro but vpns are mostly mandatory for p2p filesharing as in most countries, downloading can be a problem, but sharing will screw you big time.
So, a vpn secures (ideall) all traffic from your pc to the vpn host. You then use the vpn hosts isp and so on (in a country where your government cant ask for your data ideally).
I‘m not sure how it works for https exactly. What if you download a file, especially.
Your ISP’s knowledge base will have factors behind it. Do you use their provided router? If so, they can easily have more data about your internet usage than if you’d use your own. As far as modem’s go, I don’t think it can provide as much data compared to a router, but it’s still worth the cost to obtain more control of your information.
Overdrive seems like data middle man to me, give LibriVox and/or The-Eye a try instead. Hopefully one or both have all the books without the privacy worry.
Damn. We need a FOSS server but publishers probably would not agree. Not having to make and link a middleman account would be a bonus though. Client could probably be arranged for on some devices but even on Kobo which isn’t really locked down I would not consider running unofficial software beginner friendly.
Thank you for linking this. I read through it all, and as an avid Libby user, what quite disheartened. I just checked to see if my library has any other ebook options, but they don’t.
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