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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

#291

Post by rumanator »

lwouis wrote: post #282
jjcon wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’

Most of the world-famous libre software is built without their developers study of massively collected usage data ("telemetry"). I look at VLC as a great example to follow. Their stats show 3.4 billion downloads ( https://www.videolan.org/vlc/stats/downloads.html ), yet they do no telemetry at all. The product works great. It could be improved of course, but Outlook could also greatly be improved, and they have high-…

> Most of the world-famous libre software is built without their developers study of massively collected usage data ("telemetry").

The sort of telemetry mentioned in the article is used for UX purposes, and God knows FLOSS sucks at UX.

And by the way, Debian collects and reports telemetry since the early 2000s, and Firefox is quite open on how much telemetry it collects.

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#292

Post by bberenberg »

falcolas wrote: post #241
fouric wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there a reason why that text needs to be sent before the user clicks the "translate" button? Yes - UX latency. I would expect this kind of thing to take a few thousand milliseconds, and shaving off a few hundred milliseconds from between when the user highlights text and when they select "translate" is significant. The fact that this data is being sent to Wikipedia of all places further signals that the usage is…

> There's definitely no good reason why it should be sent to Amazon at all. I was wracking my brain on this, and all I could come up with was "to independently verify the invoicing for Bing translations" and "how many times are people accessing the definition/translation and not highlighting". So, analytics, not something that explicitly benefits the user.

Kindle devices have a dictionary on device. By looking into which words are most frequently defined, they can add these to the local dictionary to help improve the speed of the UI.

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#294

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

benmller313 wrote: post #264
falcolas wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's definitely no good reason why it should be sent to Amazon at all. I was wracking my brain on this, and all I could come up with was "to independently verify the invoicing for Bing translations" and "how many times are people accessing the definition/translation and not highlighting". So, analytics, not something that explicitly benefits the user.

Can we stop pretending that analytics don't explicitly benefit the user? Product Engineering organizations rely on analytics to improve user experiences.

I'm surprised you'd say that. Out of interest, how does analytics help websites not use blathery, unhelpful text in overly-small fonts, done too-pale to make them unreadable. A lot of UI failings are of this most basic kind.

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#295

Post by PeterStuer »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #21

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…

Would you agree that your usage pattern of the device is very atypical? I suspect (no hard evidence) tat 99% of Kindle purchasers use them primarily to read Amazon Kindle books.

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#296

Post by SamuelAdams »

BEEdwards wrote: post #87
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #21

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…

Why buy a kindle at all then? Any cheap budget tablet can read ebooks and stay off the internet.

There's also Kindle competitors, like the Kobo. You can also bet that if this becomes a wide-spread concern, another e-ink reader may come to market that offers privacy and security, maybe some sort of open-source, secure-by-default, ereader. Some attempts at this have already been made [1], but its not clear how strong the market demand for that is and if it will be successful. If you really want a privacy-centered reading experience, the easiest way to do this is just borrow the printed book from your local library.

[1]: https://hackaday.io/project/168761-the-open-book-feather

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#297

Post by fsflover »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #236
fsflover wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure about Kindle, but iPhone and Apple watch collect your location history even in airplane mode (by saving the list of wi-fi access points): https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207056 , see "Significant locations"

That document doesn't mention anything about Airplane mode at all. Nor does it describe the Significant Locations feature as "saving the list of wifi access points"; in fact, I'm fairly sure that's not what they're talking about, and instead they're talking about the feature iOS uses to determine that you tend to go to the same place for lunch on Tuesdays or the same friend's house on Saturday afternoons and offer th…

Yes, this document does not tell how and when exactly it works. I took an Apple Watch and tested it myself before writing this.

Even if you trust that Apple does not use it for anything else, you cannot check this (no source code) and you cannot be sure that they won’t start using it in the future.

Opt-out tracking is not ethical. It should be opt-in.

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#298

Post by PeterStuer »

mikro2nd wrote: post #134
gvjddbnvdrbv wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only a matter of time before devices come with 5G data connections...

...which would require a valid SIM. So just don't add one. If the device comes with a pre-inserted/hardwired/virtual SIM, well... several countries in the world require KYC-style registration of the SIM owner before networks are allowed to activate the SIM, so there'd still be an opt-out path for the user in such countries. eta: My point being: Now you're in a twisty little maze full of corner cases, all different. N…

Not in the IoT world. The 'owner' of the Sim, the company that sells the device, would have a deal with one or more network providers to allow access, and take care of facilitating data retention and identification regulation.

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#299

Post by [deleted] »

pidg wrote: post #239
fsflover wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure about Kindle, but iPhone and Apple watch collect your location history even in airplane mode (by saving the list of wi-fi access points): https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207056 , see "Significant locations"

I never turn off airplane mode, so my Kindle can collect all the data it likes! :)

[deleted]

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#300

Post by vaylian »

ryzvonusef wrote: post #116
vaylian wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eInk is a lot nicer for reading books than LCD screens. The downside is that eInk currently only supports black-and-white and turning pages is roughly only as fast as turning the page of a book. Also, battery life is counted in days (and sometimes weeks) and not in hours.

> The downside is that eInk currently only supports black-and-white E-ink Kaleido with 4096 colors at 100 ppi are available commercially since past few weeks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqiCOheb1jo

Thank you! I did not know about this. This is a really cool development. Even if the saturation (as mentioned by rtkwe) is not the greatest, this is a big step towards reading more analytical texts with colored graphs.
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