TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Snoop-friendly Kindle e-reader highlights privacy issues raised by feds’ attempts to get list of p-book buyers

By David Rothman

E-mail services like Gmail can be bad enough as potential snoop-enablers.

I agree with Tim O’Reilly that you’ve already lost your privacy in many other respects. Still, thousands of your emails could be there for federal spooks to see one day, at least in theory. D.C. says, Trust Us. I’m still Gmailing away, but with lower-than-ever privacy expectations.

So should you also Trust Us about electronic bookmarks and other details of your reading? Just when the Kindle is appearing with its own Trust Us approach—Amazon stores everything for itself and maybe unwittingly for Washington—D.C. comes along to remind us of the risk of Big Bro even without the Kindle. Via an AP story, we learn that federal prosecutors sought “the identities of thousands of people who bought used books through online retailer Amazon.com Inc.”

Avoiding ‘Orwellian’ rumors

The big news of the moment is that Federal Judge Stephen Crocker has derailed the snooping efforts and observed along the way: “Well-founded or not, rumors of an Orwellian federal criminal investigation into the reading habits of Amazon’s customers could frighten countless potential customers into canceling planned online book purchases.” At least as depicted by D.C., the snooping was part of a probe of fraud and tax evasion, involving a used bookseller, rather than for political reasons.

But long term, the real news is that the Bush Justice Department tried the snooping in the first place. Inevitably it will aim for more of the same—this in the wake of snooping into the reading habits of suspicious airline passengers.

Snoop-friendly terms of service

Meanwhile Jeff Bezos and friends will be playing do-it-yourself snoops through a TOS specifically authorizing them to poke around your machine to see if you’ve been a good boy or girl. Naughty, naughty, naughty you’ll seem if Jeff somehow finds you’ve been bypassing the DRM, and I doubt the punishment will be just a lump of coal. Away could go your Kindle service and book access—just read Amazon’s Terms of Use: “In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees.”

The frustrating thing is that by killing off customer privacy, Jeff really could be hurting himself. The more snoop-friendly the Kindle is and the company’s policies are, the less attractive could be a machine that in many ways seems promising for novices. Yes, you can store your books on a memory card. But as far as I know, you’ll also have to leave them in a library online.

Details from Jeff’s Big Bro-ish terms

Kindle’s privacy and access risks, then, clearly go beyond those of paper books ordered through online booksellers. Here’s a friendly suggestion for Amazon, one that will inevitably go unheeded. Give Kindle customers the choice of storage only on their own machines. Amazon can have access to people’s lists of titles, purchase dates, etc., but not their intimate reading habits. A compromise, Jeff? Oh, well, I can dream.

Meanwhile, if you want the specifics, here’s a gem from Jeff’s snoop-friendly terms of service: “The Device Software will provide Amazon with data about your Device and its interaction with the Service (such as available memory, up-time, log files and signal strength) and information related to the content on your Device and your use of it (such as automatic bookmarking of the last page read and content deletions from the Device). Annotations, bookmarks, notes, highlights, or similar markings you make in your Device are backed up through the Service. Information we receive is subject to the Amazon.com Privacy Notice.”

The Amazon (Non)Privacy Notice

Since Jeff and friends weren’t gracious enough to provide a link in the above passage to the Privacy Notice, I will. Among other things, it says: “We release account and other personal information when we believe release is appropriate to comply with the law…” In fairness to Amazon, Jeff’s no dummy, and given the effect on Amazon’s business, I don’t exactly see him setting up direct pipeline from Seattle to Snoop Central. On the other hand, could you envision Jeff risking his company someday in a major way to protect your rights?

(Thanks to Winston Smith, aka Mike Cane, for the pointer.)

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