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Originally Posted by jgaiser
The paranoia is strong with this one.
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Did you read any of the articles linked? The original thread I referenced in my first post had an
article from the Wall Street Journal. There was also
one from NPR.
How paranoid is it to speculate on this when they are already tracking every single page turn and highlight and note?
Quote:
Originally Posted by jgaiser
Your proof of the above statement is..?? A lot of "I think* in it. I'm more worried about Google's keeping a record of my searches (which by the way, they are) than the *maybe's* of what Amazon is doing.
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If you want to point out where I said they are definitely tracking DRM state then I would appreciate it. And I will say I was wrong. I'm speculating that is is possible. I can't be sure how many databases they are using and if they have a separate one for side loaded or synched. Personally, I would say that creating multiple databases to store the same kinds of metadata information from side loaded vs downloaded online would be an inefficient design. Good programmers try to eliminate any type of code that duplicates itself so creating multiple databases with the same tables and columns is just plain inefficient.
Yes, Google is tracking all your searches. They use it for advertising. If you have an Android tablet with GPS enabled then they can track wherever you drive to and serve up ads for local restuarants. I'm not sure why a discussion about Amazon is so irrelevant on Mobile Reads. If I wanted to talk about google tracking I would be a on some search engine forum.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jgaiser
As Elfwreck has tried to make you understand, the effort to monitor the *millions* of kindles out there is so great that Amazon is not reasonably going expend the time or bandwidth
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I've had a back and forth with Elfwreck already and addressed most of his points. His points about legality and company motives and liability are interesting. I get the sense he isn't a a lawyer and is sort of guessing on this. His technical points are much less impressive and demonstrate to me that he doesn't have a programming background.
There is something ironic about you calling me out on my uncertainty about "I think" and so forth when it appears Elfwreck is doing the same thing. Yet when it comes to technical expertise you defer to Elfwreck who clearly doesn't have a programming background.
I found it humorous that you higlighted the word *millions*. This suggests to me that you do not understand the concept of scalability in software design. You could say "billion" or you could say "ten" or "a thousand". It makes no difference. Amazon is going to hire programmers who know how to write software that scales to any number of users. Furthermore when you say *millions* you are ignoring the fact that they are already doing this kind of data collection. Take for example, the opening of the Wall Street Journal article:
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"It takes the average reader just seven hours to read the final book in Suzanne Collins's "Hunger Games" trilogy on the Kobo e-reader—about 57 pages an hour. Nearly 18,000 Kindle readers have highlighted the same line from the second book in the series: "Because sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them."
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You call it "monitoring" and use the words "time" and "effort". This seems to imply that you think there is some human labor involved. The human labor comes from the user interacting with the device triggering events that then write data to databases. The software, designed by human labor, already exists and is in place. So you load something on your device or you read a book and the software on the device simply collects the information for these events. When the device connects via WiFi or maybe at certain time intervels if always connected, it will sync with the databases on Amazon's server. None of this requires a human being except for admins who simply need to make sure that a network is up and running. But they need to do this whether there are a thousand people connected right now or a million.
No "real time" checking up on what you are doing on your device is required. Just like you don't need to be around real time when someone sends you an email. The email sits in your inbox. If you want to read it when you get back to checking email then you can read it now. Or you can leave it unopened and read it five years or 20 years from now. It doesn't matter. Or take this forum. Let's say its around in 20 years with you. If someone finds out your user name then they can simply, if they want to, read what you wrote today (20 years after today). If Amazon is tracking encrypted state of a book then if they want to, five years from now or tommorrow, have someone write a query that pulls up the names and addresses of all users that have at least one book on their device that links to books published by Penguin (another table "join" here on ISBN or some other unique key). This query can be designed in less than five minutes and the results, depending on computing power, can be returned in even less time. So don't be confused by how easily accessible this information is. With a properly designed databse it is really, really simple to do. You should already have some clue about how powerful electronic databases can be from something like Google even though you've never written a line of SQL in your life.
As far as your comment on bandwidth goes. Well they are already sending information from the device to their servers. So why do they care if they add a field that theoretically requires just one bit of storage (is_encrypted_drm = 1 or 0) in addition to what they send now? It's like adding less than 1% more to the total byte size when you factor in things like title, author and probably publisher, isbn etc have to be stored\sent. And don't confuse metadata with the actual book its self. That is_encrypted_drm field adding 1 bit, even 1 byte an ebook is miniscule.
This is where a lack of understanding of the size of data and bits and bytes and so on leads you to draw a false conclusion "it would be too much of a burden on their network so they would never do it". Keep in mind also this is a company that streams video so they aren't exactly frugal when it comes to using up bandwidth.