Lose Your Amazon Account and Your Kindle Dies

Mike writes "If you buy a Kindle and some Kindle ebooks from Amazon, be careful of returning items. Amazon decided that one person had returned too many things, so they suspended his Amazon account, which meant that he could no longer buy any Kindle books, and any Kindle subscriptions he's paid for stop working. After some phone calls, Amazon granted him a one-time exception and reactivated his account again." Take this with as much salt as you'd like.

Comments

Read through his posts...

[PrimalChrome]

He clearly states that he regularly returns big ticket items because they're 'defective'. I know a number of people that utilize this same exploit on a regular basis. They only shop at places with excellent return policies. They order big ticket items and when they realize they maxxed their CC or decide the novelty has worn off, they return them because suddenly they notice a defect. Most of the time this defect was either imaginary or simply the result of several days/weeks of playtime.

As this becomes a hit to company profits, they will have to be much more careful on returns....making it much harder on those of us with valid returns. Too bad they reinstated his account.

Re:A right to do what?

[HiThere]

However note that they COULD deactivate books he had previously purchased. That means that in the future they could do it intentionally for whatever reason suited them at the time.

In the past week they have demonstrated the ability to censor a large swath of publications and now to deactivate the right to read already purchased works. I.e., they have intentionally built the capabilities to do such things.

You can think whatever you want about the particular events that caused these capabilities to become evident, but they WERE revealed. Publicly.

Perhaps these two times were accidents. Next time it might not be. Next time it might be removing the ability to either read or purchase politically inconvenient items. Or religiously inconvenient. Or commercially. Or any other reason that suited them.

Decide for yourself if you want to trust a company that has intentionally implemented such capabilities. It's up to you. But if they've built the capability don't be surprised if they use it.