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Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

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Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#121

Post by _jal »

Despoisj wrote: post #38

As a former Kindle developer, I can say that most of what's mentioned in this article are metrics used to understand how the features are used (bookmarks, highlights, dictionnary, etc.), how much they are used, and in which country. This allows the teams to focus on features that are actively used, and sometimes lead to discontinuing features that see little to no use. Hope that helps.

The primary way that helps is to communicate that everyone on the team appeared to think this is perfectly acceptable to do without communicating it to the paying customer.

I mean, we already knew this, but it means any and all Amazon hardware must be considered potentially hostile.

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#122

Post by pqb »

irishloop wrote: post #85
lm28469 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My kindle is in airplane mode since I opened its box and I send books to it via usb. No one is forcing you to use amazon services, I didn't even pay for the ad free version but I've never seen an ad.

I've actually found it quite challenging to purchase books to put on my Kindle that aren't from Amazon, since they use a proprietary format.

I would say exactly the opposite. I regret of buying a book from Amazon [0] dedicated to Kindle-use, because it is DRM protected and I am forced to use "Amazon Kindle" application, otherwise I cannot open it. I am usually okay with DRMs but I miss a fact I haven't bought it elsewhere with less annoying protection.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Data-Intensive-Applications...

Psst, "Designing Data Intensive Applications" was very good read. Do you know similar books that focus on distributed systems?

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#123

Post by neiman »

jjcon wrote: post #111
hohohn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how every company rationalizes the mass collection of user data. "Oh lets collect many terabytes of every user-action in case we need to one day discontinue a feature". It's a book. You don't need to collect and track every fucking action I do to find out if your stupid highlighter is being used in Poland.

Whether you like it or not this collection does lead to better products - that is why you think every company does it because those that don’t usually die out. Understanding your users is vitally important. Privacy LARPers are a tiny segment of the market, the average person doesn’t really care if their ‘usage of the highlighter function is tracked’

> Privacy LARPers are a tiny segment of the market, the average person doesn’t really care if their ‘usage of the highlighter function is tracked’

If so, why don't they loudly advertise the data collection and do it only with opt-in?

It's not that the average user doesn't care if they're tracked, it's that they're not aware that they're being tracked.

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#124

Post by falcolas »

neiman wrote: post #119
falcolas wrote: post #109

This statement - "None of these requests appear to be used for customer features like last read location." - bugs me, because it's fairly obviously false, and detracts from the real concerns. To sync a "last read page" across devices, you need to send a location back to Amazon. It's also appropriate to tie a location to a device, so you can pick the appropriate device to sync your position from. And, when you highlig…

Can't you do lost of those things by sending encrypted data to Amazon, and getting back the encrypted data from them? They act as a storage in most cases, not as a server, no?

You'd have to figure out some kind of secure key sharing mechanism between phones, tablets, web browsers, and e-readers.

Or, you can trust that a position in a book (bookmarks, notes, etc.) is not sensitive information that really needs to be encrypted. This is my - perhaps overly pragmatic - position.

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#125

Post by ethbro »

Despoisj wrote: post #38

As a former Kindle developer, I can say that most of what's mentioned in this article are metrics used to understand how the features are used (bookmarks, highlights, dictionnary, etc.), how much they are used, and in which country. This allows the teams to focus on features that are actively used, and sometimes lead to discontinuing features that see little to no use. Hope that helps.

I'm surprised no one brought up revenue sharing.

I was under the impression there was a revenue-allocation problem that Amazon needed to solve (Kindle Unlimited subscriptions?), that depended on reliable reading statistics. E.g. How many people read book A?

Wish I could find the article, but the implication was there were a ton of publishers attempting to game the system. For example, by publishing blank, very long "books" and having them "read" by software automation.

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#127

Post by BCharlie »

falcolas wrote: post #109

This statement - "None of these requests appear to be used for customer features like last read location." - bugs me, because it's fairly obviously false, and detracts from the real concerns. To sync a "last read page" across devices, you need to send a location back to Amazon. It's also appropriate to tie a location to a device, so you can pick the appropriate device to sync your position from. And, when you highlig…

I mention that the data that appears to be used for those purposes is sent again in a separate request to a separate end point, so we have two types of requests: last read location, and reading analytics. Sorry it wasn't clear, I'll try to improve the wording.

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#128

Post by mumblemumble »

belorn wrote: post #91
Despoisj wrote: post #38

As a former Kindle developer, I can say that most of what's mentioned in this article are metrics used to understand how the features are used (bookmarks, highlights, dictionnary, etc.), how much they are used, and in which country. This allows the teams to focus on features that are actively used, and sometimes lead to discontinuing features that see little to no use. Hope that helps.

I don't think that will ease anyone with privacy concerns. People who are against government surveillance is not against the police catching criminals and solving cold murder cases. The Golden State Killer case was a very good use of DNA profiling and DNA databases being used to catch a criminal. The problem is that many don't trust the government to only use it for those cases, and many others don't trust the techno…

We can step outside of government examples, too, and find cases where corporations getting all data sciencey with this information have accomplished some pretty ucky - and also impossible to anticipate - things.

An instructive case here is Target figuring out that they could use customer purchase history to detect, with a pretty decent degree of confidence, when a customer was pregnant. They then proceeded to use this model to send out mailings, and those mailings resulted in people being outed in rather compromising and potentially seriously harmful ways.

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#129

Post by oblio »

jjcon wrote: post #102
neiman wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I would have known that by buying Kindle I end up working for Amazon, I indeed wouldn't have bought one. It's deception. Please put on the box a big warning, "THIS DEVICE COLLECTS YOUR DATA", similar to those on cigarette boxes.

It’s called the terms of service?

1. Nobody actually reads Terms of Service (well, governments and some major businesses do, but 99,99% of regular users don't).

2. Nobody reads them because most of the time they are explicitly user hostile, I'm pretty sure they are designed to prevent users from reading them.

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#130

Post by jjcon »

enchiridion wrote: post #82
moksha256 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I came here to say the same. I'm about as tin-foil-paranoid-privacy-all-the-things as they come, but the "invasive" data mentioned in the post don't seem particularly invasive to me, and collecting that data seems perfectly appropriate for the purposes you mentioned. With all that said, I do dream of a PINE64 E Ink device (or something that's open and hackable).

Remarkable is open and hackable. https://github.com/reHackable

It also costs more than an iPad and has terrible response times
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