Amazon Spying On Your Ebook Highlighting
from the who-owns-what-now? dept
There have already been plenty of questions over who "owns" the ebooks you've bought, with stories of remotely deactivated books and remotely deactivated features -- neither of which happens when you have a real physical book. But there are also other concerns opened up by newly activated features. Apparently one new feature -- sent in by a few concerned readers -- is that Amazon will now remotely upload and store the user notes and highlights you take on your Kindle, which it then compiles into "popular highlights."I have no doubt that the feature provides some interesting data, but it's not clear that users realize their highlighting and notes are being stored and used that way. Amazon basically says there's no big privacy deal here, because the data is always aggregated. But it sounds like many users don't realize this is happening at all. Amazon says people can find out they added this feature by reading "forum posts and help pages" -- but it's not clear how many people actually do read those things. While I'm sure many people are fine with this, others might not be. And it once again highlights a key concern in that the "features" of your "book" can change over time. Your highlighting may have been yours in the past, but suddenly it becomes Amazon's with little notice.
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Filed Under: ebooks, kindle, ownership, spying
Companies: amazon
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Notes and original content rights should be handled differently.
Because of this, I would say that notes about a book are highly personal and potentially contain corporate secrets. As of right now, it puts up a HUGE block to use of ebooks if notes can be exposed to unauthorized third parties or even Amazon.
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Baen Books set the way, sell them to you, and they are yours. Period freaking dot. They even allow you to redownload them again later for no extra charge.
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If it was as you reported, there would be a problem, but it is opt in. The kindle owner must explicitly allow this to occur with their notes and highlighting for it to happen. So its not a copyright issue or amazon ruining the privacy of its users.
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Re: Opt out
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2010/05/as-the-battle-of-e-book-readers-heats-up-amazon-is-trying-to -beat-the-competition-by-continually-adding-new-features-to-its.html#posts
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Why the surprise?
So surely, it goes through the Amazon servers...
How else could you do sharing the notes you take between the various version of the book you have?
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Why do sites keep mixing up the notes and the highlights?
They are not stealing your notes! It helps no one when you conflate the two ideas.
Yes, your notes are stored on Amazon servers. When you delete that book you can download it again and get your notes back. When you open the book on another device you can access your notes. This is a typical archival service unrelated to the "popular highlights" service that you have been getting all hot and bothered about.
Amazon has already been doing this. Here is a web page that shows the data.
http://kindle.amazon.com/popular_highlights
Where is the copyright violation? Where is the privacy violation? Save you righteous indignation for a situation that calls for it.
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Or a .txt file on a general-purpose smartphone or portable media player, or -- gasp! -- netbook, on which you can install your own operating system and software.
E-books aren't bad as such. Just don't use devices you can't control.
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Nothing new
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The right way to do it.
This reminds me a bit of the Google Buzz case. Just remember to ask your costumers first before you publish any new data about them, and stop focusing on if it is legal or not. It's not that hard, and you will loose goodwill if you don't.
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The problem is that they are collecting the data...
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Re: The problem is that they are collecting the data...
So much for reading comprehension.
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Re: Re: The problem is that they are collecting the data...
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Uploading Comments To My PC --Not Amazon Central
It's a shame that Amazon (and the other e-book vendors) have yet to understand this point. While they seek to "monitize" me and my work (giving me no credit, or compensation) .. they don't seem to want to provide the state-of-the-art e-book readers and PC software that I need to make paying for this hardware worthwhile.
Amazon needs to rethink its belief that the Kindle is really their's to do with what they want, and respect the buyers' rights and purposes. Maybe I would allow them to upload my notes, and maybe I wouldn't. At least give me the option to say "yes" or "no".
One can only wonder if Amazon thinks it has the right to go into my email account, or onto my laptop, to see my other notes too--just because I am a Kindle owner?
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Give Me Convenience Or Give Me Death
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Electronic Frontier Foundation has
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Only Highlights, not Notes, on books bought from Amazon
Recently I enabled Annotation Backup and noticed that Amazon is only storing the Annotations (Highlights, Bookmarks, and Notes) that I created after I enabled the backup. Amazon did not go back and fetch highlights or notes I made while backup was disabled.
In addition, Amazon is only doing this for Annotations on books I bought from Amazon. The books and documents I created or bought from other sources do not have Annotations stored on Amazon servers.
It seems to me that Amazon provides control to me whether or not I want my highlights or notes stored on their server.
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Probably CYA after the "1984" Debacle
This is how they can protect themselves against that in the future, backing up your notes so they can retrieve them for you if they do this again.
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Irritating highlights
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