It seems like the answer for both should either be a conditional yes or a conditional no, since both can only track your book purchases if you do a particular thing which you can avoid doing if you don’t want anything tracked.

generally green is ‘good’ and red is ‘bad’
It’d make more sense to have the no answers green in this chart.

The Kindle, on the other hand, creeps me the hell out. I care less about what they are capable of doing than the fact that they won’t tell us what they agree to do and not do. These companies can steal someone’s first born because of some obscure wording in a 2000 line Eula, but can’t promise not to steal the books we buy or brick the device we pay for because of something we should be able to do.

This may be in part unanswerable since it is “unknown” whether B&N can monitor what you’re reading.

If not, then the Sony and Kindle are equal in that regard.

Do you think if you bought a book for cash at a brick and mortar that the store manager would follow you to your home, enter your home while you are sleeping for the purposes of cataloging your entire library and then proceed to destroy any titles he did not want you to have? I believe that is called breaking and entering… yet that is exactly what Amazon has done earlier this year http://blog.oup.com/2009/07/amazon_fail2/

If you give customers a clear choice between paying more for a product and keeping their privacy or paying less and giving up privacy, you can make the same amount of money and everyone is happier.

It’s the sneakiness that gets people.

I’d also be willing to bet that most people would willingly give up some privacy to save a buck.

Source: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/my_reaction_to.html

Daniel J. Solove
George Washington University Law School

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565

That is to make it easy for the “Firemen” to find you… which begs the question… at what temperature does an e-reader ignite?

Me, I’m going the same was as with music. Find the de facto standard (epub, like mp3), find a reader that does lots of standards and doesn’t bollix around with crippled newspapers over the air and page-turn snooping (cool-er, squeaky but good), and just read.

For that matter, “keeps site logs” is not exactly a huge privacy violation; first, it’s easy enough to do your searching while logged out, if you care, and second, with as much traffic as they get, it’s all but impossible to pull a single user’s trail; they look at aggregated data to improve usability. *assuming they work like every other company I’ve worked for; I don’t work in B&N IT, nor do I know anyone there.) I’d be astonished if EFF and BB didn’t do the same thing.

I used to work for Amazon – and still I resent them having the ability to delete purchased books from my online account or even my device.

Imagine a book is pulled by court shortly after you purchased it. They can go into your device and delete sth that you have bought. Because – it isn’t really yours, is it?

I mean, it’s not like I’m gonna have Sensitive or Embarrassing E-Books…

What, are they gonna come for my when they find out I’ve got Harry Potter on my E-Reader?

Yes, on one hand it’s a bit rubbish that you’re paying someone $300 for the privillage of giving them market research, but on the other hand, if Amazon, B&N, and Google KNOW what I want and will pay for, then in theory, they’ll put more effort into producing/providing the content I want.