331–340 of 393 posts
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Is that Kindle that promiscuous that it will literally connect to any open AP without prompting?
Parent comment was > if the developers take the egregious step of nerfing airplane mode, and I was responding that IF the developers decide to nerf the airplane mode it's very possible they will start using any open AP; some TV's are reportedly doing this already
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…
why not? if i open a book on my phone that i stopped reading on my kindle, i want it to open to the last location i read to on my kindle. not ten pages back because it doesn't sync data every page turn for some imaginary privacy benefit.
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Even if the developers take the egregious step of nerfing airplane mode, you can still "opt out" by not giving the device credentials for your WiFi network.
Only a matter of time before devices come with 5G data connections...
If you are using a device designed to market to you - they almost all run ads and collect analytics. I guess this is technically not a user facing feature, but it provides some user benefit (cheaper price).
Does anyone know sales breakdowns? If everyone is concerned about privacy / not being marketed too I guess the versions with ads are not selling. But I've been surprised not that marketing platforms collect data (authors website did) but that most users don't care about this "abuse" that the author is so concerned about.
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> 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…
The screen refresh rate on these devices is measured in seconds , so a few hundred millis of network latency is impossible to display.
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…
It can't just track the very last page in the book that you read, because authors were gaming that by encouraging people to immediately skip to the last page of very large works they didn't otherwise care about. Instead there's some kind of heuristic that tries to figure out if you've more-or-less-normally read the book.
It seems that the author is not really that surprised with the amount of data being collected.
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>Plenty of companies are quite transparent about their data collection practices (set up an Apple device recently?) 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 wi…
This isn’t buried in a tos or legalese https://www.groundctl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/csm_IMG... Apple prompts you for each piece of data collection during the setup of an iOS device (and lets you choose if you want to share).
Most companies hide it in legalese. Some companies claim they're not sending any data and then send it anyway. Looking at you Philips Hue lights.
How are the alternatives. Although i will miss my collection of books but I'm going to be in the market for the next ebook reader.
I wrote https://remy.grunblatt.org/blog/kobo-aura-h2o-hacking.html a while ago. At some point it sent ISBN to google. The domain I extracted for my kobo aura: api.ipinfodb.com api.kobobooks.com auth.kobobooks.com authorize.kobo.com kbdownload1-a.akamaihd.net kbimages1-a.akamaihd.net mobile.kobobooks.com pool.ntp.org script.hotjar.com social.kobobooks.com ssl.google-analytics.com static.hotjar.com stats.g.doubleclick.…
I'm sure someone like me always has the same "hot take" in every thread regarding this, but I honestly still love reading physical books. After spending a day weary of interacting with screens all day, there is something nice about tapping in to this activity that humans have done for hundreds of years. Sure, e-ink is easier on the eyes, but isolating myself with a good book can be a near spiritual experience.
I love reading physical books too, the user experience of them is so much nicer. I also like to go back to re-read books. With non-fiction I'll often want to go back to reference or quote something, and with fiction I love reimmersing myself in the worlds the author's create. I've amassed quite a little library of books that I still enjoy having access to and it's lovely. But it's also /terribly/ inconvenient to move…