Quote:
Originally Posted by sealbeater
Obviously. However, they are selling hardware. Most attempts to tie hardware to services fail and rightly so. If someone is planning on side-loading books, they certainly aren't looking for a service.
All I need is an e-reader. I'm quite happy to not give Kobo money for their service and I'm sorry for anyone who had to sacrifice their privacy to read.
Let's be clear. When you register your device, they are getting and keeping and analyzing and indexing and cross-referencing an lot more than an non-existent email address.
The very fact that they don't care what email address you use just that you "register" the device should tell you they are tracking other stuff.
According to https://www.eff.org/pages/reader-privacy-chart-2012
The Kobo "seems to have the capability to keep track of book searches because it indicates that it shares those searches with third parties". |
That's for searches on their store (which will not happen with wi-fi off), not for searches on your device. Amazon tracks searches on the Kindle store the same way, as do most other store. Kobo also allows you to turn off reading stat tracking entirely under preferences.
I've never registered on their site or used their desktop app (as I mentioned above, you don't need to; just put a bogus line in the local user database and you're good to go), and wi-fi is always off on my reader. It has no networking capability outside of that, so no way to transmit info (personal or otherwise) to Kobo—the only way it's ever got
any connectivity is exposing itself as a storage device so I can copy books onto it from Calibre on my Linux desktop.