[haertig]

It's your Kindle, do what you want with it. I'm not condoning pirating books. I'm just saying, "It's your Kindle, do what you want with it". Amazon doesn't have a say in the matter, or at least they shouldn't. It's your Kindle. I dare say that Amazon has much more to lose than you if they were to decide to violate their customers privacy expectations. I'm not saying they can't or won't, just that it would be incredibly stupid for them to do so. They're in the business to make money. You won't make money for long if you abuse and piss off your customers, regardless if your abuse is technically legal.

If you're worried about it, after registering your Kindle, put it in airplane mode. Permanently. Delete your WiFi credentials so it doesn't accidentally connect to the internet. You can sideload all your books, even ones you buy from Amazon. You can sideload OS updates too. There is zero necessity for ever putting the Kindle online (after initial set up) other than convenience, and a few features like syncing your reading location across different devices. To get X-Ray and a few other Amazon features you probably need to go online (download the books directly from Amazon rather than sideloading). But if you just want to read a book and don't care about the bling-bling features, just stay offline permanently.