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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

#381

Post by Google234 »

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-…

VLC’s UI is horrible.

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#382

Post by Google234 »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #141
jjcon wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Usefulness is NOT the same as usage. Metrics can tell that story though so you’re arguing a straw man. Example: If you see that 99% of users have never used a function ever - you have a pretty good idea that it needs to be reworked or removed. You may also see a function that is used by 80% of users once a month, that you may opt to keep.

I'm not sure. While I understand that developer time needs to be cut down or restrained sometimes - though perhaps not at Amazon in this case, which concerns their core business -, your example could merely turn out to be a way of losing 1% of the users. Usage statistics alone cannot tell you whether your users hate or like a feature. Some features are always going to be used more than others.

What if that feature costs 30% of dev time? Without being able to measure you wouldn’t be able to make a good judgement. Imagine how science would work without experiments?

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#383

Post by dusted »

tweetle_beetle wrote: post #115
dusted wrote: post #44

This is only one reason why I absolutely love my Kobo Aura HD, it's never been connected to WiFi. Its storage device is a standard SD card which can be swapped for a larger one. Oh, and it's not giving money to Amazon which is always a big win for me. It also happens to be a super nice piece of kit, and it has my warmest recommendations.

That's a sensible approach, but sadly Kobo probably does something similar for those who are less savvy than you: > We collect Personal Information when you use or otherwise interact with the Kobo Services. For example, we collect information about how you use the Kobo Services, such as pages you view, the rate at which you consume e-content (how often and for how long), genres, authors or subject matter you prefer a…

Oh, I've actually never read that, I wrongly assumed that != Amazon == good guys.

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#385

Post by ancarda »

thdrdt wrote: post #131
jacquesm wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really matter does it? You don't collect data without consent, period. Why is that so hard to understand? Why don't developers ever push back against this sort of thing? Collectively we build this stuff, we are not 'soldiers following orders' which makes us responsible for what we create. The current actual use is not relevant. Consent and the possible uses are relevant.

I think your comment is unfair. Every webserver logs the IP address and the URL visited. Do you think most people know this? Do deverlopers push against this?

>Every webserver logs the IP address and the URL visited.

I maintain a webserver - https://git.sr.ht/~ancarda/tls-redirector - that has no support for logging. If you wanted logs for some reason, you'd need to modify the source code to add that functionality.

Granted, tls-redirector isn't a general purpose webserver, but even in production I tend to turn off logging. I just don't see the need to have logs lying around that I never use.

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#386

Post by Tijdreiziger »

doc_gunthrop wrote: post #346
Tijdreiziger wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I checked (a year ago?) KFX wasn't a great input format, as it's optimized for the Kindle readers and not for conversion/interoperability. That is, KFX is to AZW3 as PDF is to HTML.

Sure, but if the book you're looking for is only available on Kindle and your eReader is not a Kindle, then the conversion is better than nothing. I've found some O'Reilly ebooks only available on amazon in the format "Kindle Edition" (ie. KFX). Pretty aggressive market strategy from amazon given EPUB3 is the technical standard, but there you have it.

On my Amazon account, I can download my purchased books as AZW3 from the following page: https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/myx ('Manage Your Content and Devices'). (As I understand it, AZW3 is mostly the same thing as EPUB3.)

(Either that, or the files I download from there aren't actually AZW3 files but just KFX files with an .azw3 extension.)

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#387

Post by grawprog »

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…

>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.

Why is location needed for that? Shouldn't a device id and account work just fine? I don't need to share my location to sync other devices.

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#388

Post by whynotminot »

samatman wrote: post #352
whynotminot wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok so you don't know, you're just speculating without evidence.

No, the entire scenario is a hypothetical, the standard of evidence is inapplicable.

I don't understand the point then.

Literally any device you own with WiFi could be updated tomorrow to connect to any open access point.

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#389

Post by jjj123 »

Google234 wrote: post #380
jjj123 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s an important distinction to make: this tracking doesn’t necessarily lead to better products, it leads to better business metrics. Sometimes a better product comes out of better business metrics, but other times they’re directly opposed.

This is not true. What if for example you want to make a change to the dictionary feature because you imagine that it’s not useful and should be less prominently accessible. How would you measure if this is a good idea or not without tracking its use? This has nothing to do with business and everything to do with making the product better.

Sure, there’s an example where best case the user experience is improved and business metrics aren’t affected. But I assure you if that app has a decent analytics setup they’ll also be tracking business metrics, and if for some reason business metrics went down with that change past some acceptable threshold, that change won’t be launched.

Now if you look at opposite case, where a feature is worse for user experience but helps business metrics, that feature will definitely be launched. A small, mostly harmless example: Ever tried to hide twitter’s recommended accounts? It gives you the option to “see less often”, but curiously there’s no option to stop seeing the window forever. Why? Because clearly it benefits twitter’s business on average to keep showing these recommendations.

I’ve built enough dark patterns at my last job to know it always comes down to business metrics.

Re: Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

#390

Post by gvjddbnvdrbv »

Google234 wrote: post #382
jonathanstrange wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure. While I understand that developer time needs to be cut down or restrained sometimes - though perhaps not at Amazon in this case, which concerns their core business -, your example could merely turn out to be a way of losing 1% of the users. Usage statistics alone cannot tell you whether your users hate or like a feature. Some features are always going to be used more than others.

What if that feature costs 30% of dev time? Without being able to measure you wouldn’t be able to make a good judgement. Imagine how science would work without experiments?

Wouldn't focus groups work better AND respect your users?

Devs think it is either telemetry or develop blind but in reality software was developed (and possibly was better) before telemetry using focus groups.

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