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When Your e-Books Read You

Posted by Soulskill on from the they-get-bored-and-put-you-down dept.

theodp writes "'Perhaps nothing will have as large an impact on advanced analytics in the coming year as the ongoing explosion of new and powerful data sources,' writes Bill Franks in Taming The Big Data Tidal Wave. And one of the hottest new sources of Big Data, reports the WSJ's Alexandra Alter in Your E-Book Is Reading You, is the estimated 40 million e-readers and 65 million tablets in use in the U.S. that are ripe for the picking by data scientists working for Amazon, Apple, Google, and Barnes & Noble. Some privacy watchdogs argue that e-book users should be protected from having their digital reading habits recorded. 'There's a societal ideal that what you read is nobody else's business,' says the EFF's Cindy Cohn."

3 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. This one is pretty easy to solve by nurb432 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Don't buy books from those vendors, don't enable wifi on your reading device.

    My nook touch hasn't checked in since the day it was registered ( which was required to make it work.. grrr )

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  2. Re:But think of the advertisers by Lumpy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I am. That way I can buy one cheap to hack and make into a normal device.

    Kind of like the Kindle "special offers edition" Smacked those ad's and other crud right out of there. Yes I shed a tear nightly for all the engineers that live on the streets due to my actions.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  3. Re:What's different about an ereader? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Rented videos? Noted..

    No, not noted http://epic.org/privacy/vppa/ by law. It's why Netflix pitched a hissy that they're not allowed to auto-publish your video rental history on Facebook http://money.cnn.com/2012/03/27/technology/netflix-facebook/index.htm