E-books are becoming tools of corporate surveillance

[medler]

Reading this made me grateful that there are still ways to avoid all this surveillance. For example,—and this is just the tip of the iceberg—reading Standard Ebooks on a privacy-respecting ebook reader.

[aorth]

Standard Ebooks is a fantastic project. I have been supporting them for years. I love their attention to detail of typography and their approach to building the books in the open, from source code, with open source tools. I wish their project existed in many other languages! The only caveat is that they have to wait for books that are in the public domain.

[neilv]

A year ago, I bought a PocketBook InkPad Lite for this purpose, and keep its WiFi disabled, as an interim solution, until hardware&firmware that guarantees privacy.

I buy non-DRM ebooks (so far, they cost about twice Kindle prices), and `rsync` them to the ereader over USB. More info: https://www.neilvandyke.org/ebooks/

[getwiththeprog]

https://standardebooks.org/

[ARandomerDude]

> privacy-respecting ebook reader

Suggestions?

[kdwikzncba]

Can you give me an example of a pricacy-respective ebook reader?

I recently bought a Kobo Nia, and then returned it because it required me to create an account before I could use it.

Afterwards I got a PocketBook Basic Lux 4. This I have been using without having had to create an account. I've also never connected it to any wifi. However, I have no way of knowing, without taking significant effort to investigate, whether it's not connecting to free wifi's and relaying back to home my books list etc..

[Springtime]

> Many students are required to use Elsevier’s digital books and learning products in order to complete coursework... By default, Elsevier surveils every page a student visits on the internet—whether it’s related to their education or a google search for nearby abortion clinics. Then... sell[s] this information to data brokers.

Am I missing something where it goes from reading Elsevier's books and using their site to making the leap to internet-wide surveillance?

From skimming through the SPARC report they cite it seems various findings are based on privacy policy language, one of which states that 'browsing history', 'search history' and 'interactions with our and other websites' may be collected, though this reads like it may just involve their own sites' analytics with only the latter involving other sites (which could be just outlinks but is unclear).

While the rest of the report seems to just cover some overviews of their own cookies and open-ended concerns about third-party scripts (which include general CDNs and their own analytics hosted by third-parties).

[ksjskskskkk]

its one example. then she list 4 others. your company probably gives you safari books and lynda... ALL of those record every single action for DRM purposes. the side effect is that now you reading list, how long, what time you read which line etc is all collected and readily available to anyone as we know what happens to all data (from marketers to gov to law enforcement etc)

[StanislavPetrov]

And they wonder why we download books from Z-library with a VPN instead of the, "legitimate" option. It is very similar to using ad blockers. If "legitimate" businesses refuse to let me view and pay for their products without being tracked, loaded with malware and/or having my data sold to third parties, then as far as I'm concerned they have no grounds to complain when I go another route.

[jwrallie]

I am pretty sure Amazon was giving me ads based on books on my kindle that I did not buy through Amazon, so you also would have to pay attention not to connect to any network even if you acquire books by other means.

[ausaus]

I read purchased ebooks with DRM stripped in Calibre on a jailbroken Kindle with KOreader.

[65a]

koreader is great, I have a (very) hacked up pinenote that runs koreader, and the reading experience is very good. It's also extensible enough that you can easily port/customize it to new devices or hardware.

[Moldoteck]

so you have commited a crime, bc afaik stripping drm is illegal. At this point why not just pirate it? Are you doing this to pay the author for his work?

[gnicholas]

> Without laws to stop them, it’s reasonable to expect that popular library apps like Hoopla and Libby are hiding similar behavior behind legal smokescreens.

Whenever I check out (non-audio) books on Libby/OverDrive, it always just sends the books to my Kindle Cloud Library. This presumably means OverDrive doesn't know what passages I actually read, or for how long. And the mere fact of my borrowing seems to be protected by state law (many states, including CA, protect this information). [1]

It would be interesting to know how these surveillance tactics run up against these privacy laws.

1: https://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacy/statelaws

[cratermoon]

This is mostly about Amazon Kindle, but it also mentions Hoopla, an e-reader app. Presumably this applies to things like Overdrive as well. I'm satisfied with my Kobo, epubs and Calibre.

[gnicholas]

The scariest part of the article (for me) was about information being packaged and sold. In that regard, the article was not about Amazon, since it is not alleged to have done this. Of course, Amazon is huge enough that they can profitably use reading history to sell you other things. But it would be worse if they were also selling off your private reading history.

[southernplaces7]

Stripping DRM, making "your" books really your own books, and then transferring, storing and reading them however you damn well please are the sequence of simple solutions to the corporate/legal crap that's so common these days and to the parasitic garbage described in the article.

Also, just resorting to plain pirate copy torrenting and download, because if the combination of legal players who make getting your own DIGITAL copy of book so bloody complicated and restricted want to take that route, they deserve a few leaks in revenue.

[legitster]

> By default, Elsevier surveils every page a student visits on the internet—whether it’s related to their education or a google search for nearby abortion clinics.

How is this even possible? The article has nothing to back this up.

And it's not even an e-book! Elsevier uses a custom JavaScript "reader". So it's just a web page. But I think someone read their privacy policy and got confused about what they are capable of.

[pcstl]

I was thinking the same thing. This article seems remarkably light on the facts. They throw around a handful of scary words, but there is very little evidence to back it up or even specifics of how this surveillance might be happening or what data is being sold.

[masterfooo]

That is exactly why I have thousands of offline books in my offline library and I use a no internet/wifi Android ebook reader to read them.

[verisimi]

> E-books are becoming told off corporate surveillance

Perhaps it's a small point, but the title is wrong imo. There's no becoming about it, this was a major point all along, from inception. Just like mobiles are spying devices (updated so that batteries are non removable now), like smart meters, like electric cars, etc.

Some of us have known and talked about the level of spouting being baked into hardware for a long time. This sort of intrusion was telegraphed, but missed by most technology fans, who have misplaced their faith with government and corporations.

[nikolayasdf123]

get printed books (or pdfs), distill your own water, grow your own food (if you can)

[BramLovesYams]

I only buy physical books. Not trying to be sarcastic here, but I have yet to find an E-Reader that gives me the same relaxing feeling that looking at ink on paper does at the end of the day. For the the library-in-one device convenience hasn't outweighed the disconnected simplicity of reading a book.

After spending a work day staring at a screen I have zero interest in looking at at yet another display.

[hammyhavoc]

There's reading for pleasure and then there's reading as a requirement.

Carry around dozens of 1000+ page technical reference volumes? Nah, no thanks, I'll take an instantly searchable e-reader I can stick in my pocket, with non-destructive notes, highlights and bookmarks that'll sync between my devices.

Reading for pleasure? Gimme a hardback any day.

[phendrenad2]

Pretty sure GDPR/CCPA prohibits them from actually making use of this data. But simply collecting data for temporary use is enough to get the expert journalists another day's worth of copy.

[pfix]

Is this a concern to EU citizens? Seems to be one of the reasons the GDPR exits.

[switch007]

It should be if you use apps/websites run by companies outside of the EU or small enough to not care.

GDPR doesn’t put the fear of god in to every company on the planet the way many people seem to think it does

[pxtail]

It seems to me that you are putting too much faith in GDPR - if particular service kind of flies under the radar then I'm assuming that nobody who operates it cares about GDPR

[Yodel0914]

This may well be a serious issue, but it's hard to tell because this article is atrociously written.

[lolinder]

I started rolling my eyes at "reader surveillance is a deeply intersectional threat", and it didn't get any better from there.

A whole lot of platitudes and speculation about how women and minorities are hardest hit, but essentially no actual information on who is doing what with which bits of data.

[IG_Semmelweiss]

Almost no research, despite implying multiple threads to pull on interesting original research... and yet the article is 100% an appeal to emotion and/or tropes.

Opportunity lost , indeed

[dylan604]

at this point, any app, device, service, website that does not actively promote the fact that they do not harvest data, track, spy, etc should just automatically be assumed that they are. The money to be made is too good. The requirements to do it are too easy. The usability impact on the user is negligible if it's even measureable to non-existent.

It's pretty much like this war has been lost, but nobody wants to admit it or even admit it existed.

[catchnear4321]

> It's pretty much like this war has been lost, but nobody wants to admit it or even admit it existed.

i didn’t hear no bell. (bell sound is a subscriber exclusive.)