Big Brother in Every E-Book?

According to the Wall Street Journal of June 29, 2012, e-books transmit back to the publishers, authors, and who knows who else a lot of data on the reading activities of people who read e-books. Here's that article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304870304577490950051438304.html?m...

The publishers etc. know, in short, what you are reading, how long you spend reading, whether or not you read the entire book at one sitting, whether or not you underline anything and if so, what, whether or not there are any sections you re-read and if so, what those sections are, on and on.

There are also some very interesting discussion comments following the end of that article.

My question for the LibraryThing community is, do any of your libraries have a policy of alerting your library patrons about the lack of privacy involved in reading e-books? If not, why not? I feel strongly that this is a topic that should be discussed at every library conference in the world this year...stat, as in starting now.

I guess there are ways around a lot of this if one is concerned. I only know the kindle, so this might not help others.
1. Don't mark any passages.
2. Don't turn on the wireless while you are reading the book. Set the cursor back to the cover before you turn on the wireless.
3. Alternatively, download your notes to your computer, then erase them from your kindle books.

k4k

I have a Kobo without wireless. I download the books onto the hard drive of my computer and load them to the e-reader from there.

Kobo keeps offering up suggestions as to books which might interest me but haven't yet cottoned on to the fact that I NEVER read James Patterson books. I don't think that Big Brother is watching me very closely.

Pinkozcat and everyone, here is a link to the ALA American Libraries magazine website article titled "A Digital Dilemma: Ebooks and Users' Rights"

http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/features/05292012/digital-dilemma-ebooks-an...

Thanks for the tips on specific e-readers. I'll ask Barnes & Noble about Nook privacy options as well.

Maybe it's because they're non-profits, but libraries seem slow so far to anticipate the profit motives of e-book publishers and e-reader vendors. Of course these publishers/vendors want to collect data on user behavior. I might be willing to consider the information-collection needs of some authors; that's different. For me, the freedom to be beyond publisher/vendor analysis or tweaking or micro-management, is a major issue.

Here is an analysis as of December 6, 2010 from the U.S.-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, across a large number of reading devices:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/2010-e-book-buyers-guide-e-book-privacy

Here's an October 2011 article from PC Magazine on the California bill signed by Governor Jerry Brown. This law took effect in California on January 1, 2012, requiring a warrant (court order) for release of e-reading-related information. For those living outside of California, you might want to contact your legislator to ask that a similar law be enacted in your jurisdiction:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2394064,00.asp

Here's a link to the new Google Play platform.

https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_7_8gb

Their new Nexus 7 player subsumes an e-reader, music player, and gamer device; that's the good news. The bad news is that in the history of computing, single-purpose machines always have the longest operating life. And I'm still waiting to see Google Books' privacy policy address the privacy questions I ask them about earlier this week. At that time, I did ask Google Books to provide the same level of user privacy as is mandated in California by the above law. Time will tell.

I've heard other Calibre users mention buying the books from whichever retailer they use, then running them through Calibre to turn sharing and data collecting off. Don't know if that works or not,though.

For those of you who are ALA members, my letter to ALA about the lack of reading privacy in E-books is has been printed in the November/December 2012 issue of American Libraries magazine. Here is the website for AL Magazine, but not all its content (especialy letters) is online:

http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/

I have to say that I don't much care if these companies track what I browse or read or highlight. I am not doing anything illegal, deviant or immoral. What frightens me is the news that publishers and writers will use this data to bend their work to the tastes of an increasingly culturally dumbed down public mass.

>7 jldarden: The entire purpose of companies tracking what people do is to serve their own means, not to see if people are being illegal. They track everything so that they can target people with better accuracy. Giving them all this info willingly is never a good thing.

It is important to understand that there is nothing inherent in an ebook, per se, that allows such information to be gathered. It's when we interact with a provider's servers that information is revealed. If I allow a Kindle or Nook to synchronize my bookmarks across devices and apps, that means that I am storing that information in a company's "cloud" or servers. So, if one is paranoid about information being revealed, do the following: Turn off Wifi and/or 3G connections except when you actually need to use them. Choose _not_ to synchronize bookmarks or highlights across devices or platforms. And, as someone else suggested, return a book's page count to #1 (or the cover) before turning on communication with the servers. Read your ebooks in a reader application that is _not_ supported by Amazon, B&N, Google, etc. Since, unless digital rights management (DRM) protections are removed, you may have to register the app or device with Adobe, which provides another window on your reading habits. Disabling DRM and/or converting the format of your ebooks can make them more private.

There is nothing inherently less private about an ebook. It is the applications on both readers and computers and other devices, that allow the vendors to collect this information.

Hope this information is helpful,
-- Candace

The US Constitution and Bill of Rights guarantee each citizen's right to privacy. It is surprising to see the exercising of a US citizen's right to privacy even being thought of as being "paranoid." It is even more surprising that virtually all US public libraries have begun offering E-books without educating library patrons about the conditions under which reading privacy has been far more difficult to achieve than reading any physically printed material. As an ALA lifetime member, I have asked that an ALA ombudsman be appointed so that I can request further updates on this important matter.

The heart of the matter on E-book privacy policies may be the current reliance on opt-out measures such as the examples given by people earlier in this thread. What I think is more appropriate is an explicit "opt-in" strategy, to ask the library's E-Book clientele to consciously surrender reading privacy, if at all. "Opt-In" would be more supportive of our existing constitutional and legislative safeguards, whereas "Opt-Out" is a corporate giveaway that is consistent neither with ALA values nor ALA Intellectual Freedom committee guidelines.

Good news: As of 2014, ALA started to dig seriously into Ebook privacy issues at their conferences. Here is one example of some questions they have been discussing: http://www.oif.ala.org/oif/?p=5182