211–220 of 393 posts
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Only until you come into range of any open WiFi which is every public place everywhere
Is that Kindle that promiscuous that it will literally connect to any open AP without prompting?
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I honestly don't mind the FUD as long as user don't have options. Amazon deserves the bad press in that case. Kindle is an awesome screen reader, but such features make it a bad device. A good device just had an option "sync usage data to Amazon account" . People suggest it is a technical impossibility. It is just a shame that you have no options. Had to quickly search if my kindle has GPS capabilities. Gladly it doe…
I pointed this out in a thread, but with the e-reader devices at least, you do have an option. It's opt-out, which sucks, but it does exist.
Note that it doesn't just suck because you're giving up using the Kindle itself. It also sucks because you'll be losing your entire collection of Ebooks, which are DRM-encumbered and can not be ported to other non-Amazon devices/platforms/apps.
This makes it extremely difficult for other privacy-respecting platforms to compete on the market, since using them requires the user to either break the law by stripping DRM from their books, or to abandon their entire purchased library.
Future TOS/EULA/Privacy changes that might not have been in place when a user originally bought their Kindle can thus be forced on them by making it prohibitively expensive for the user to opt out or change ecosystems.
This is why I download e-books from the dark web and read them on an airgapped machine, free from The-eye-of-Amazon
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Is that Kindle that promiscuous that it will literally connect to any open AP without prompting?
Here on hn, I read several stories where smart TVs did exactly that: they tried all available wifi networks to see if one of them worked. It doesn't seem so far-fetched that the Kindle might, too.
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> 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.
You think companies should loudly advertise something people don’t care about? That doesn’t make sense. Plenty of companies are quite transparent about their data collection practices (set up an Apple device recently?) Most people are aware of data collection, they care more about functionality though.
I have not, not recently, but what you say is simply bullshit. They're "transparent" in that they give you a ToS loaded with legalese that they know you couldn't easily read through to find just how much and where they're squeezing your life for information to store. In cases where they simplify this with some less legalistic declarations of data use, what you often see there are numerous weasel words and phrases to very ambiguously describe what's being done. You know, things like "We MAY collect some information for the sake of improving user experience" and blah blah....
Then of course, there's the outright lying, which also happens, in which big tech companies simply fail to mention some types of data collection anywhere (the Amazon Alexa voice recordings being listened to by humans is a good example iof this)
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I pointed this out in a thread, but with the e-reader devices at least, you do have an option. It's opt-out, which sucks, but it does exist.
> which sucks Note that it doesn't just suck because you're giving up using the Kindle itself. It also sucks because you'll be losing your entire collection of Ebooks, which are DRM-encumbered and can not be ported to other non-Amazon devices/platforms/apps. This makes it extremely difficult for other privacy-respecting platforms to compete on the market, since using them requires the user to either break the law by…
I have quite often seen people here and on other tech forums assume that purchasing a Kindle means being locked into Amazon's ecosystem, giving up personal details, and having the risk that your books might be deleted. But you don't have to use the Kindle's internet connectivity: I have owned three generations of Kindle, and with each one I activated airplane mode the second I unboxed the device and I never turned ai…
I now do the same. I never take it off airplane mode unless I send a PDF or something to the device.
But this kind of explains it, to me.
The character analytics stuff is probably contractual obligations they have to publishers. The publishers probably want to double check the way people read as well and ensure that they are paid out correctly.
The other logging, as someone else mentioned is probably analytics for their own product development.
I have quite often seen people here and on other tech forums assume that purchasing a Kindle means being locked into Amazon's ecosystem, giving up personal details, and having the risk that your books might be deleted. But you don't have to use the Kindle's internet connectivity: I have owned three generations of Kindle, and with each one I activated airplane mode the second I unboxed the device and I never turned ai…
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207056, see "Significant locations"