Quote:
Originally Posted by desertgrandma
Read the article. Incomplete.
Now. Tell me, exactly, what the problem is if Amazon knows everything I have on my reader.
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While I think some of the privacy paranoia is overblown, I can address this one.
Problem if Amazon knows what I have on my Reader (if I had a Kindle etc etc): None. Amazon does not care what I read, except to be able to better target book ads for me, which is mostly to my advantage.
Problem if Amazon turns that info over to (1) gov't officials, (2) corporations who want to sell me something, (3) third-party agencies working for "the people," (4) academic, scientific or religious organizations with an agenda: potentially massive.
(1) The gov't could decide I'm a potential terrorist because I have Atlas Shrugged on my reader--after all, the protagonists seek to bring the downfall of the United States. More possibly, if I were already on some kind of alert-list (for, say, political activism in my youth, or just for being married to my husband, who AFAIK is still forbidden to return to the state of Florida), the contents of my Reader could be used as an *excuse* to claim I'm a potential terrorist (between the Rand, Doctorow, and my XKCD collection, any gov't analyst who got past the slash collection would probably be horrified).
(2) I don't want to face more targeted advertising. I don't want my family harassed by organizations trying to sell us stuff. I don't want to wade through more gimmicky offers of "free trial offers" that you have to shut off by writing to the head of the company, on parchment, in Farsi, or you get the lifetime subscription package.
(3) This is the one that worries me the most. I have a lot of fanfic on my reader. A lot of slash fanfic. A lot of very explicit slash fanfic. I don't want the details of my reading habits gone over by some organization that thinks such writing is "evil" and they must "protect the children from porn." Which my kids don't have access to. But some people believe that, if there's explicit content in the house, that house is unfit for children. And some of those people work for social service agencies.
(4) I don't want my reading habits skewed to "prove" some agenda or another; I don't want them used to indicate that middle-aged women have no purchasing power (because most of what's on my reader is free books) or that non-Christians are perverts (see pt. 3) or that office workers prefer 80's music (I have a few songlists on my reader), or any other whacked conclusion one could get by claiming that the contents of my reader indicate (1) the entirety of my reading habits and (2) deeply important things about my lifestyle.
None of those is a horrifically pressing concern. Believing that any or all of those is really what's going on, is paranoia. But they're all at least somewhat plausible, and tie into security breaches/misuses we've seen in other venues.
I think giving a corporation access to your private reading material, and the ability to collect data about it, is troublesome; it's reasonable to be concerned about it. It's reasonable for people who are concerned about one or more of those aspects (or something else I didn't cover, perhaps involving financial data that doesn't matter to me 'cos I have no finances to speak of) to want to avoid Kindle/Nook/Sony Daily to avoid the problems that can come with giving wireless access to one's book collection.