Quote:
Originally Posted by questionfear
My question: How is this any different than if I walk into Barnes and Noble and purchase a book on my credit card? My CC company has the information about the transaction, so does B&N. Presumably this also gets saved in a giant computer.
Excuse me, I'm going to go pop on my tinfoil hat and burn my ID now.
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In your example the credit card has a record that you made a purchase of a book from Barnes and Noble but not what the title was. Barnes and Noble has a record of the book you bought but they are regulated about how they handle the private data they collected.
This is talking about the devices logging everything that you read, when you read it and the ability to gather that data and claim they own it. Not just the books you bought from B&N but the books from any other source. It's intended to draw attention to the ability, question the right of the companies to gather this data and foster debate about if this is private data or not.
I personally believe it's private data and the companies have no right to gather it. There is proof that Amazon is logging the data locally on the device but I've seen no evidence they're gathering it. I'm interested on how the others compare.
Some additional tin foil hat food for thought.
I heard on the radio that there was a big surge in sales of the book that Tiger Woods had in the back seat of his car when he tried to drive it up a tree. If a company had a record of all the books he read in the last two years could they sell it to the tabloids? Eeewww maybe he was reading the Kama Sutra on the night he met the waitress in Vegas.
In 20 years will the next Prime Minister candidate for Canada have to defend the books they read in the last 20 years. Maybe Sarah Palin would like to buy the data so she could answer the question about what newspapers and magazine she reads.
The Joseph McCarthy trials were before my time but I'm sure he would have loved access to this kind of data. I'm sure that people that lived through it have a strong opinion about it and they probably aren't wearing tin foil hats.