So the central argument seems to be that Academia.edu profits from the patterns of access and related metadata that academics generate as they do their daily wo

So the central argument seems to be that Academia.edu profits from the patterns of access and related metadata that academics generate as they do their daily work. Academia.edu then sells this data to private R&D companies to point them in the direction that the academics are moving. Even after reading through this paper, I'm not convinced that this is inherently a bad thing. Many corporations (cough Elsevier cough) profit off the backs of publicly-funded academics in much more pernicious ways. Now, if Academia.edu were allowing companies to purchase the specific page-views of specific researchers (or allows subsetting the data specifically enough to target one group with decent confidence), then that would be very damning. I suppose I should go re-read the privacy policy: https://www.academia.edu/privacy https://www.academia.edu/privacy.