Ebooks: convenience vs privacy (chart)
Many readers turn to ebooks mainly because digital books are extremely convenient to read. The ability to sync the content between user’s all devices is one of the most convincing features.
On the other hand, if you end up reading a book on a tablet in a certain location, and open on your e-reader exactly in the same location, it means that a piece of data was accessed by the digital content provider. To be precise: not only accessed, but also stored.
We’re concerned about privacy on Facebook, but we should also be concerned about privacy when it comes to ebooks.
Social networks are meant to share info. Books are different. Books are meant to be a personal pleasure. It’s not exactly what’s happening when we switch to digital reading.
Since 2009 Electronic Frontier Foundation tracks privacy policies of major ebookstores, including Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Ebooks, Sony, Overdrive, Indiebound, Internet Archive, and Adobe Content Server.
While syncing the latest-read location seems to be justified, some other areas raise the question: why do they need this information? Some data won’t be directly used to improve the user’s experience. For instance, why do ebookstores monitor what you read and how you’re reading?
The chart below answers the following questions:
- Can they keep track of searches for books?
- Can they monitor what you’re reading and how you’re reading it after purchase and link that information back to you? Can they do that when the e-book is obtained elsewhere?
- What compatibility does the device have with books not purchased from an associated eBook store?
- Do they keep a record of book purchases? Can they track book purchases or acquisitions made from other sources?
- With whom can they share the information collected in non-aggregated form?
- Do they have mechanisms for customers to access, correct, or delete the information?
- Can they share information outside the company without the customer’s consent?
Please make sure to visit the EFF blog post for more details. The chart was prepared by Cindy Cohn and Parker Higgins, with the help from Hannah Bloch-Wehba.
Electronic Frontier Foundation: E-reader privacy chart
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About Piotr Kowalczyk
An ad man who decided to devote his life to books. A founder of Ebook Friendly, ebook enthusiast, and self-published short story author. He reads mostly on an iPhone, but when it comes to history books, he always picks print.
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A Woman of No Importance:
The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
by Sonia Purnell
Prologue
France was falling. Burned-out cars, once strapped high with treasured possessions, were nosed crazily into ditches. Their beloved cargoes of dolls, clocks, and mirrors lay smashed around them and along mile upon mile of unfriendly road. Their owners, young and old, sprawled across the hot dust, were groaning or already silent. Yet the hordes just kept streaming past them, a never-ending line of hunger and exhaustion too fearful to stop for days on end.
Ten million women, children, and old men were on the move, all fleeing Hitler’s tanks pouring across the border from the east and the north. Entire cities had uprooted themselves in a futile bid to escape the Nazi blitzkrieg that threatened to engulf them. The fevered talk was of German soldiers stripped to the waist in jubilation at the ease of their conquest. The air was thick with smoke and the stench of the dead. The babies had no milk, and the aged fell where they stood. The horses drawing overladen old farm carts sagged and snarled in their sweat-drenched agony. The French heat wave of May 1940 was witness to this, the largest refugee exodus of all time.
Day after day a solitary moving vehicle weaved its way through the crowd with a striking young woman at the wheel. Private Virginia Hall often ran low on fuel and medicines but still pressed on in her French army ambulance toward the advancing enemy. She persevered even when the German Stukas came screaming down to drop 110-pound bombs onto the convoys all around her, torching the cars and cratering the roads. Even when fighter planes swept over the treetops to machine-gun the ditches where women and children were trying to take cover from the carnage. Even though French soldiers were deserting their units, abandoning their weapons, and running away, some in their tanks. Even when her left hip was shot with pain from continually pressing down on the clutch with her prosthetic foot.
325 words read…
+ Kindle + Print
