Thread: Disable Activity tracking?
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Old 12-30-2019, 02:22 PM   #46
JSWolf
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Posts: 80,124
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Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: Roslindale, Massachusetts
Device: Kobo Libra 2, Kobo Aura H2O, PRS-650, PRS-T1, nook STR, PW3
Quote:
Originally Posted by davidfor View Post
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.
I think the stats are also used to know that books that have been started but not read in a while can be presented to be marked as unread if you desire. Is that correct?
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