As I read this press release earlier today I got to thinking. This company, Smart’s Publishing, is just leveraging the technology and tracking recipient reading habits to better serve their customers. Pretty straightforward stuff and highly useful information for the newsletter publishers using the service.
We don’t think too much about the footprints we create when opening and reading e-newsletters, but what if similar tracking features found their way onto your Kindle or other e-book reader? Would you care?
Privacy valued by consumers
My sense is that most consumers feel their book-reading habits should be considered private. Of course, if you’re buying your books through an online vendor or using a member discount card at a brick-and-mortar store, well, your habits are already being tracked.
I’m talking about something much more granular than this though. For example, would publishers like to know what percentage of customers typically only get about 20 pages into an e-book before giving up and never reading the rest?
Would reference book publishers like to know what topics tend to be the most viewed or what terms are most frequently searched for? Could these patterns have value? Absolutely.
Someday: Pay extra for privacy?
Perhaps that’s another pricing model that will find its way into the e-book world:
You could pay one price for privacy where your activity isn’t being tracked or a lower price if you’re willing to let the vendor capture your habits and potentially sell the resulting data.
Moderator: Joe raises important issues, and I hope others will weigh in. One thing to keep in mind is that with the ad-supported model, user data would be more helpful to publishers and marketers than even with the paid model. But what about the negatives? Quite objectively, the threat isn’t just from corporate invasions of privacy—for example, insurance companies finding out you’re reading books on cancer. Washington is far, far more interested than before in snooping into citizens’ private lives and, yes, has gotten the private sector involved, sometimes in rather problematic ways, as in the case of illegal wiretapping and other snooping. Should the cash-strapped be penalized because they can’t afford books without spy-friendly “features”? On a separate matter, I just noticed that Windows Live Writer tripped me up again, so that my byline, rather than Joe’s, briefly appeared over this post. Sorry, Joe. – D.R.
This is the reason that I won’t buy a kindle. It is too easy for them to set the thing up to report back what I’m reading when I’m reading it and how. Most people will say that is just simply harmless. Why could I possibly be concerned with companies collecting data about me? The short answer is they don’t need to know anything about me that I don’t volunteer, and I shouldn’t have to volunteer personal information to do business with most of them. Something like an insurance company does have a right to some of my personal information, withing reason. A book publisher, or television service provider does not. Companies or the U.S. government don’t need to know these things about me. In the case of the businesses all they need to know is that I’m willing to pay for their product. They might like it if I write them a note and tell them what I think about their product, that would be my choice. They do not under any circumstances need access to information that I don’t provide freely. As for the government they should be even more closely controlled as to what information they can obtain about someone. The greatest possibility for abuse, in my opinion is from the government.
While the issue here is about e-books it is these small steps and chipping away at our personal lives that is a problem. It is the death by a thousand cuts method. Each tiny slice doesn’t seem overly painful until you realize one day that you are bleeding from head to toe and it is too late to do anything about it.
Maybe I’m just a touch paranoid but it seems to me that it is getting entirely too easy for everyone to know things about my personal life that, quite honestly is just none of their business. I say that as I post a comment on website. Didn’t say I had to be logical about my privacy just paranoid about it.
I met a couple cruising in their sailboat in Hawaii. We were told that we were supposed to report to the Harbormaster our whereabouts, even though we might me 30 miles away and no transportation was available. I went to the office and inquired why they wanted the data. They said “In case we need to contact you in an emergency”. I then inquired as to how many of these notices they had had in the last 5 years. None. Did they track people arriving by airplane. No, of course not. I refused to fill out the form. My friend, who had escaped from Communist Russia by crawling through the snow and into Greece said, “Guard your freedoms because if you do not you will lose them!”
If I discover that my data are being reported back to Amazon from my Kindle, I will turn off the whispernet permanently. I think they would be incredibly stupid to do so without our knowledge. Look at what happened to Sony with their rootkit!