Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben Thornton
That does look mostly harmless, to be honest.
My gripes with a Kindle would be device lock-in, lack of folder support and no touch screen - this doesn't look like much of an issue compared to those.
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+1
I like a bit of privacy as much as the next person - I live in the middle of a treed 5 acre block, and I have a No Junk Mail sign on the mailbox. But I also like to try and keep some perspective and balance about these things.
Every time I'm in public, people are making snap judgements about me based on the data they gather. It's an unavoidable part of life. They'll use the way I look, my age, how I'm dressed, my ethnicity, the car I drive, what my voice sounds live and so on. And I do the same to them. The judgements can be wrong, but for the most part the consequences aren't much of a big deal. Nor are they usually irreversible.
Companies tend to write the sort of stuff that we're talking about here for two major reasons:
1) To protect their own back-sides from litigation. This can come from the oddest of angles, so the wording tends to be pretty broad.
2) For commercial reasons. This can take a few forms but mostly it means building a customer data base in order to try and sell them more stuff. Properly done this is cheaper and more effective than paying for blanket ads that reach millions of people who won't ever be interested anyway.
The point here is that I'm not giving Amazon permission to search my house or use my Kindle for some unspecified malicious purposes. There's no commercial advantage in them pissing me off, and what are they going to do? Threaten to tell the blokes at the pub that they found a Jane Austen book on my Kindle and blackmail me for their silence? Start a separate site to publish all the lamest and weirdest things they found on a Kindle? There's also no mileage for them in doing this 'hands on' - the price of wages would far outweigh any possible extra sales - it could only be done cost-effectively by mashing the data through a program that tried to pick what you might like to buy next.
I actually LIKE them to make suggestions on what I might like to look at, based on my prior record. One of the downsides of the hundreds of thousands of titles online is the difficultly in ploughing through it all in search of fresh material. If they can help, then I'd say THANK YOU! If I don't like their suggestions I just ignore them.
Suit me anyway.
