Privacy Concerns

[CWatkinsNash]

Originally Posted by Thalia Helikon

Make it easy for Book Sellers to track your behavior--
* Turn on Social Annotation: highlight passages, make notes
* Leave WiFi Turned on all the time
* Purchase books through the bookseller using the WiFi

Limit the amount of data available to booksellers
* Don't use the WiFi, sideload your books via USB
* Turn off Social Bookmarking
* obtain books from a variety of sources, preferably DRM-free

Any other recommendations?

I would only add, when possible, sideload via calibre or Windows Explorer rather than through the ereader's software. I don't know whether or not any reader software pulls the data from the device, but if they do, that's another point where the info can be uploaded to the retailer's servers.

[speakingtohe]

I think that the probability of someone randomly hacking into your computer to take your ebooks and upload them as torrents etc. is pretty slim. If you have totally unique ebooks and they know that that you have them (maybe you are an author with an unpublished work that is complete?) then maybe it would be worth the time involved to an obsessed individual.

I would worry more about personal documents or someone using your computer to send out spam etc. through your IP.

Helen

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by chaley

Calibre provides no GUI or command line method that I know of to set or change a book's UUID. You can change a UUID by writing directly to the database (very dangerous) or by changing calibre's source code.

Or, in the case of an epub, by opening the ebook in Sigil and editing the content.opf file.

However, I suspect that running a book through Calibre removes its trackability...along with its sync-ability. If it can be synced across multiple devices, *someone* is tracking *something.* But it's likely that tracking is removed from tracking-of-purchased-books, because after it's gone through Calibre, the seller can't be sure what has changed--is it the same book? Were new sections added? (Two books in a series combined into one ebook, perhaps.) Was the font changed? Were pictures added? Was it translated to another language? Annotations merged into the main text? (I have a digital copy of Bujold's "Shards of Honor" that has a link to a 20,000-word fanfic in the middle, so I could re-read the book, stop and switch to the fic, and go back to the main story without losing my sense of the timeline.)

Without taking the book apart and reading it, they can no longer know if it's the "same" book that was purchased, and there's no point in tracking how it's read.

[unboggling]

This discussion about privacy supplements my other reasons for using cables to sync or load rather than wireless or cloud-based methods, and to avoid vender-supplied sharing options. Which are (1) Keep it Simple, and (2) I'm simply old fashioned. Which also happen to support maintaining privacy.

But since metadata download gets stuff from various online sources, and I assume my network address is involved in that, my basic privacy doesn't exist anyway. One of the best metadata download sources is Amazon. So until I stop downloading metadata from Amazon and other sources, my privacy is blown. If my assumption about that is wrong, please somebody let me know.

PS. And my internet provider knows where I've been and what I've been doing too…. If they want to.

[speakingtohe]

[QUOTE=unboggling;2135163]

But since metadata download gets stuff from various online sources, and I assume my network address is involved in that, my basic privacy doesn't exist anyway. One of the best metadata download sources is Amazon. So until I stop downloading metadata from Amazon and other sources, my privacy is blown. If my assumption about that is wrong, please somebody let me know.

QUOTE]

Interesting point.

I have never bought books from Amazon although I did get one for free one my mother. The book recommendations seem to be based only on that book. Seems that if they do track metadata downloads thet do not yet use thme for marketing?

Helen