Reader privacy

[ProfCrash]

I am not worried about it. Amazon pulled one book, apologized, gave everyone who had the book pulled two free books or one free book and the book they had pulled.

As for personal documents you load on your Kindle, I don't believe Amazon can pull those. I believe the only files Amazon has access to are the ones that you purchase through them or convert through them. The items you side load are not in Amazons data base and I don't think they are able to touch them.

[Anarel]

Originally Posted by ProfCrash

I am not worried about it. Amazon pulled one book, apologized, gave everyone who had the book pulled two free books or one free book and the book they had pulled.

As for personal documents you load on your Kindle, I don't believe Amazon can pull those. I believe the only files Amazon has access to are the ones that you purchase through them or convert through them. The items you side load are not in Amazons data base and I don't think they are able to touch them.

They also gave them a thirty dollar credit.

[ProfCrash]

Was it $30? I thought it was one free book at first and then a second free book or 1984 returned to their Kindle.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by KNI

Something I wonder about - Amazon has proved, by deleting books from customer's Kindles, that they are entirely capable of downloading the titles of your reader library. I am 100% confident that Apple can do the same, and indeed, so can the makers of any device that "features" cell phone network.

Amazon can delete Amazon purchases from a Kindle. Their new TOS commitment is that they won't without a court order, but you get to decide how much you trust that. (However, previous deletions were done without any hands-off statement on their part.)

It's unclear whether their system would allow them to delete your own documents. Different programming would be involved in that. They *need* access to what you've gotten from them to allow them to sync between readers; side-loaded ebooks are outside of that system. Even if they do have access (and a good argument can be made that they do, at least hypothetically), they don't have any legal right, not even the remote stretch they attempted (and failed) to use with 1984, to remove your own ebooks.

Even if it's named "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.mobi," that's no guarantee that you've got an unauthorized copy of the book. Maybe you have a series of essays your friends have written. Without opening it, they can't tell if the content violates copyright. Opening it would involve (1) a court order to be legal and (2) a ridiculous amount of manpower to check; while "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.mobi" looks like a copyright violation, "HP7_DH.prc" is a lot less obvious. They're certainly not wasting time sorting through people's personal documents trying to find ones that *might* be illegitimate ebooks.

[ProfCrash]

I don't know that Amazon can read the files you have on your Kindle. The books that they pulled were purchased at Amazon and were part of your Kindle archive.