privacy question

carlos

I use firefox portable and i installed zotero only in my portable drive. I have concerns that as zotero reads every website i visit that my privacy might be in hazard. That is why i have not installed it on every computer i use.

Does zotero read every website i visit or only those that contain scholarly documents? Does zotero transmit my info to a server or how does it work? Is my privacy safe (for example when i pay my bills by internet) while having zotero installed?

Regards,
Carlos

dstillman

See the FAQ (second-to-last question).

scot

Zotero looks for bibliographic data on sites whose URLs match certain regular expressions. This way it can harvest bibliographic data from the sites it is designed to (amazon.com, university libraries, online databases). It ignores all other sites entirely, and never sends any data from the sites you view anywhere. As per the faq, the only communication it has with a central server is to update pieces of zotero itself.

Your privacy is not in danger. Zotero knows nothing about pages you visit for which it doesn't have a translator. And about those pages it does have a translator for, it only knows that it has bibliographic data in a form it can recognize until you click the icon in the address bar.