Big Kindle Is Watching You
Here’s why I will never buy a Kindle:
The other notable software feature added in Kindle 2 is one that mostly represents potential. At the new unit’s introduction, Bezos said that the device could sync both content and a user’s location within that content across multiple devices. At the moment, that means different versions of the Kindle, but it works eerily well. It was strange to download a book that I had started on generation one and have it open to the very page I had been reading on generation two, an experience our Editor in Chief Ken Fisher also found spooky.
Look, I’ve been accused of being paranoid before, and maybe I am, but the modern world is, without a doubt, a paranoia-generating machine. George Orwell envisioned the surveillance state arriving via heavy-handed government intervention — TVs that watch you, children who are trained to spy on their parents, etc. And we’re certainly getting some of that, with Britain at the vanguard. But what’s also happening, in the background, is actually a lot more insidious, and possibly more dangerous: our privacy is being systematically violated (a) by corporations who slip past our natural defenses through the expedient of insanely cool technological awesomeness; and (b) with our consent.
I’ll admit it — I think the new Kindle is absolutely gorgeous, and I’d like nothing better than to read all my books on a wafer thin slab of lovely. But doing so means not just that Amazon knows exactly what books you own; not just that they know exactly when you’re reading them; it means that they know exactly what part of them you’re reading at all times. Think about that. You come across some of the naughty bits in Lady Chatterly’s Lover, a bell goes off in Amazon Central Control, someone picks up the phone and calls the Unauthorized Lasciviousness bureau of the FBI, and ten minutes later a couple of jackboots show up at your doorstep, tsk tsking menacingly. That’s a silly scenario, of course, but it’s possible. When in human history has it been so easy to look over everyone’s shoulder at the same time?
Amazon isn’t the only offender here, or even the scariest. Gmail reads all your email so that it can generate appropriate ad content; Comcast monitors your incoming network data to look for “illegal” downloads; Tivo keeps track of your viewing habits, for “aggregate” analysis. I don’t think any of these guys — except for maybe Comcast — have any malicious intent here. Google still seems like a good and upright company, and TiVo is still just pretty much wall-to-wall awesome. But any assessment of their capabilities that doesn’t take the future into account, when either they — or the government agency that’s taken an unhealthy interest in its citizenry — decide to use their powers for evil, is a flawed, and dangerous, assessment.
At the moment, Amazon is doing its very best to keep people from buying the Kindle — by charging $360 for it, and $10 a pop for books, in the midst of a scary recession — so this particular danger isn’t immediate. But the price will come down, and it feels like paper books — ie, books that require an actual spy to be actually looking physically over your shoulder — are on their way out. Maybe by the time that happens we’ll have come up with some way to enjoy the fruits of our progress without sacrificing our privacy to them. But I’m not hopeful.
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