Thread: Disable Activity tracking?
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Old 12-29-2019, 12:42 AM   #44
davidfor
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Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: Sydney, Australia
Device: Kobo:Touch,Glo, AuraH2O, GloHD,AuraONE, ClaraHD, Libra H2O; tolinoepos
Quote:
Originally Posted by alec123 View Post
This is good to know. Thank you for checking with Kobo.

From a privacy standpoint, it would be comforting to have a patch which would periodically delete this information from the database, or even an option from the Calibre side in the "Kobo Utilities" plugin.

Even though Kobo says it won't be sent to their servers now, many of us have been burned by companies accidentally disregarding software privacy check boxes and/or policies during software updates, etc. It's much better to remove the possibility proactively.

Looking in my reader's database just now (Kobo Mini running 4.19.14123), there were many lines in the activity table from the last few days, and almost none from before upgrading to 4.19. So it is true that the data collection is now turned on even if sharing is disabled.
You are looking at the wrong table. The Activity is used by the device. With the previous tiled home page, it was used to decide what tiles were on the screen. It might still be used for this, but, it is now pretty much a "write-only" table. It is possible that the data is read into memory at startup and used from there. Then writes or deletes are done as the data changes.

The Event table is the main one used stats. That gets update with a lot of things as you read a book. I've done some analysis of what is in it in the past. But, it is mainly events related to reading or otherwise handling books. I'm not sure how much of this is ever sent to Kobo.

The table AnalyticEvents is the main one used for the reporting to Kobo. If you look at it when the data sharing is on, it builds up entries until a sync is done. The entries are sent and then cleared. If you turn the data sharing off, it is cleared and one entry is added. The has "Type" of "TrackingOptOut". I have been watching this on one of my devices, and nothing is being added to it.

The other place for data tracking is the file "Analytics.conf" in the directory ".kobo/Kobo". This has the Google Analytics in it. From memory, that just has a placeholder in it when the data sharing is off. I haven't watched this file enough to be sure of what happens with it.

You can clear the stats any time you want. Just toggle the data sharing option on and off again. That clears the Event and AnalyticEvents table. And I think the Analytics.conf file. If you do that with the WiFi off, is shouldn't be able to send anything.

If you are still worried, my Kobo Utilities plugin has a function to add a trigger to the database that automatically deletes any new entries added. And you can replace the file Analytics.conf with a directory of the same name. These steps should prevent anything from being stored to be sent later.
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