E-books are fast becoming tools of corporate surveillance

[LordP]

Color me unsurprised.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90996547...e-surveillance

Major publishers are giving Big Tech free rein to watch what you read and where, including books on sensitive topics, like if you check out a book on self care after an abortion. Worse, tech and publishing corporations are gobbling up data beyond your reading habits—today, there are no federal laws to stop them from surveilling people who read digital books across the entire internet.

[maddz]

Another reason to download your purchases and read on a non-internet connected device.

[rantanplan]

In general, GDPR would protect this kind of data on an individual's level. However, pseudonymized data would still be something that could be used by companies.

[Aleron Ives]

Unless I missed something, this seems to only apply to textbooks? The author is mad at Elsevier, which doesn't surprise me, since textbooks were a scam long before electronic ones became a thing. There's no evidence offered that regular e-books have tracking scripts, web beacons, or other nonsense embedded in them, though.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

Unless I missed something, this seems to only apply to textbooks? The author is mad at Elsevier, which doesn't surprise me, since textbooks were a scam long before electronic ones became a thing. There's no evidence offered that regular e-books have tracking scripts, web beacons, or other nonsense embedded in them, though.

I've dived into the code of plenty of ePub eBooks and none of them have tracking code in them.

[DiapDealer]

Color me uninterested even if true (which it's not).

[Sirtel]

I doubt many people living in democratic countries are going to care, as it's not a life or death issue for them (well, so far). For people living in different regimes it may be a very serious issue, but I'm not sure how widespread ebook reading is in those parts of the world. Most ebook reading seems to be centered in the English-speaking countries, which are mostly democracies.

Personally, I don't much care either at the moment (it could change in the future, of course). My ereaders are almost always offline anyway. My browsing history on my computers probably contains far more sensitive material than my ereaders (no, I don't mean porn).

[cfrizz]

I'm too busy reading my books to be paranoid over who might be curious about my paranormal reading habits.

Besides which, all of my books are immediately downloaded to my pc and other devices. None of which beside my pc are online until I turn them on to be so.

[ZodWallop]

That felt like an article trying to stir the pot and make people scared, rather than report honestly on something that might be a problem to some people.

[haertig]

If you want the convenience of having your eReader online, then being tracked is the price you may have to pay for that convenience. If your eReader is permanently offline, you can't be tracked from it, but you lose out on some things like syncing reading positions to other eReaders, download of book covers, etc.

Separate from being tracked from your eReader, your purchases can be tracked to whatever computer you made the purchase from. You can hide that as well. But with DRM, a purchase could be tracked to the account the eBook has been encrypted for. We will stop this dive down the rabbit hole now, because the next steps to avoid DRM tracking may begin to involve things that we do not discuss here.

You have a choice for your eReader though. My personal choice is "permanently offline", but I have no problem with others making different choices. I am OK with my purchases being tracked. That happens everywhere, at just about every online merchant. But tracking beyond a purchase, like tracking reading habits, speed, which purchases you actually read rather than collect for later - that's getting too personal for me to allow, if all's I have to do is keep my eReader offline to thwart it.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

That felt like an article trying to stir the pot and make people scared, rather than report honestly on something that might be a problem to some people.

Agreed.

It says that “hunger for reader data is increasing risks of criminalization and violence.” You would think that there then would be some examples where readers were victimized because it was publicized that they had read a controversial ebook. So why is there no example?

[JSWolf]

There is no need to be paranoid. That article is BS. regular eBooks do not have tracking code.

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

That felt like an article trying to stir the pot and make people scared, rather than report honestly on something that might be a problem to some people.

Nah, it's a machiavellian ploy by Big Print to scare people back to dead tree books

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

Nah, it's a machiavellian ploy by Big Print to scare people back to dead tree books

I tend more to the click-bait theory.

Much like one article I read on how the ereader and ebooks are dead. Compared to holding a "real" book with it's accompanying smells, ebooks just are not desirable. Physical bookmarks are better than digital ones, no one needs to search a book and flipping back to the Table of Contents is so much easier than a couple of taps on an ereader screen.

[ownedbycats]

Considering how horrible the 'recommended for you' Kobo provides are, I'm not overly worried.