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When Your e-Books Read You
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."
In Capitalist America, book reads you!
I am officially gone from
Someday some genius is going to have the bright idea of being the sole content provider who does not mine users' personal data for targeted ads. And people will sign up in droves for all the pent-up demand.
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 ----
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.
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
That only tells someone what you bought, not what you read, how often you read it, what parts you reread, etc. While the first part is useful, it isn't as useful as having all of it. There's a reason why Librarians fought so hard to prevent giving over your checkout history to other parts of the government several years ago.
Rented videos? Noted. Subscribed to a magazine? Noted. Visited a web site? Noted. Searched for something? Noted.
Not even scratched the surface. How about "last page read", "text highlighted", "bookmarks taken", "time spent reading"? These are all things that B&N and Amazon know about your reading habits that weren't covered in your "don't worry-be happy" list.
It's one thing to notice what book the person across the room is reading, but standing behind them and taking notes is a whole level up from there.
The more everyone decides to move to electronic devices we don't control - ebooks, iOS, most Android devices, WP7, Facebook, DVRs that report on our viewing habits, and many others - the more this reality will come to pass. Every single thing we ever with anything electronic will be tracked, logged, used to form advertizing profiles of us, and a government database mined to find da terrurusts.
We get the reality we chose to buy. Most people are choosing to live in this world by preferring those products over others without the privacy problems. Thus, it is the world we will get.
...but standing behind them and taking notes is a whole level up from there.
Which is pretty much why I rip the DRM out of any book I buy (for futureproofing) and only use my reader device offline, using Calibre to manage content.
"'There's a societal ideal that what you read is nobody else's business,'"... no, no there isn't.
When speaking about the act of reading, there is some expectation of privacy, at least from the government. This isn't related to businesses per se, but librarians have fought to keep library records private and as such, their policies and software try to keep records for only as long as necessary (e.g. the duration of loan). Librarians often refuse to give out information on their patrons unless there is a court order.
This same sort of ideal can be applied to businesses in the form of opt-in data mining, but U.S. society needs to make this sort of decision in the form of information privacy law.