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The E-Reader Privacy Invasion

-- By EdwardBontkowski - 31 Dec 2009

The E-Reader Explosion

Often in class, Professor Moglen threw out interesting hypotheticals to gauge our concern regarding various privacy issues. One of the most interesting privacy hypotheticals he posed was whether we would agree to a deal in which we could read anything we wanted for free as long as we allowed the things we read to be tracked by the provider. While I expected answers supporting both sides, what truly struck me was how close (and quickly) our information technologies are getting to the proposed hypothetical. What I thought was a hyperbolic hypothetical meant to demonstrate was actually, I realized, a point which Moglen thinks we will cross in the near-future. If the current trend in “e-reader” technology is any indicator, then we are not far off from such a point.

“E-readers” or “e-book readers” are portable devices used to display e-books. While e-books were a relatively new concept rising to popularity in the mid-90’s, today e-readers themselves are one of the hottest and fastest growing pieces of technology. While e-reader devices existed at the end of the 90’s, it was not until the use of “e-ink” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrophoretic_display#Electrophoretic) by the Sony Reader in 2006 that the industry really started to take off. Shortly thereafter, Amazon came out with the “Kindle” in 2007 and the e-reader craze was officially ignited. In just over 2 years since its release, the Kindle has become the most gifted item on Amazon.com. More astonishing, however, is the fact that Christmas Day 2009 marked the first time that e-book sales surpassed print book sales. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/dec/28/amazon-ebook-kindle-sales-surge)

The Privacy Invasion

However, depending on the type of e-reader you own, all this electronic convenience may be coming at an extreme cost to privacy. The Amazon Kindle, Google Books, and Barnes & Noble Nook are the greatest privacy offenders. All three of these devices can keep track of your book searches. Much like other Google services, Google logs all search data with your IP address as well as your Google Account. Just as they do with their main sites, both Amazon and Barnes & Noble track data on books you view and also associate them information with your respective accounts for each site. All three also track all of your purchases made with the e-reader as most require that you be logged in to your account to be able to make a purchase. Google Books’ tracking capabilities are especially offensive to privacy. In addition to the aforementioned capabilities, Google Books can track each book you read, what page in that book you read, and even how long you viewed it for. It doesn’t stop here, though. The newest Kindle (along with the Nook) comes with wireless capabilities and Amazon gives itself incredibly broad control over the information it wirelessly collects from you. The Kindle license agreement uses vague language such as “device … will provide Amazon with data about your Device and its interaction with the Service…and information related to the content on your Device and your use of it”. Several internet forum groups have even suggested that the wireless connections allow Amazon to establish the GPS locations of people using Kindles. http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=51371

These same tech-savvy forum members have found ways to avoid the brunt of the privacy assault attempted by the Kindle by disabling the offending code. However, your average user does not have the knowledge to attempt such workarounds. In fact, the root of the problem is that you average user doesn’t even realize that their e-readers are even capable of such egregious privacy invasion to begin with. “After all,” a user may think, “even if Amazon could track my location, why would they want to?” Not surprisingly, none of the companies even attempt to enlighten these customers in simple, straightforward language as to the privacy rights they are relinquishing to these companies through their use of the device. Instead, they prefer to bury such invasions within complicated and vague “Terms of Use” similar to the Kindle one described above.

The Free Software Solution

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