Google, Amazon, Microsoft make the Mozilla naughty list for Christmas shopping Mozilla has slapped its "Privacy Not Included" labels on several products from Google, Amazon and Microsoft – just in time for Christmas shopping. This marks the first time that the Firefox maker has put the warning on Google devices, and it's a depressing sign that tech giants are getting even worse with their data collection …
Actually, if you read Mozilla's PNI piece on the Kindle (linked in the article), you'll see they rate it as a fairly mild offender. They do make some recommendations, and they warn that Amazon is in general terrible about privacy. But I think for many people the Kindle's degree of invasion is a reasonable trade-off for the advantages of e-books, in use cases where those advantages apply.
Personally, I prefer physical books, but I still read quite a bit on my Kindle, because it is convenient in many situations. I've also used it to host audiobooks for long car trips, though Amazon have managed to break that functionality (sometimes audiobooks purchased through Amazon don't show up on the Kindle app, and the Kindle devices don't pair with the car's audio system for playback) so badly that I've given up and switched to the Audible app.
And as I've noted before, I actually find Amazon's recommendation system for books quite good, as it's pointed me to several authors I ended up liking very much. It's also made wildly incorrect recommendations, but those are easy to filter out prima facie. Curiously, only a couple of times has it recommended something that looked like I might want, but then proved to be a disappointment.
All that said, physical books make much more pleasing gifts, since there's something to actually hand over, and wrap/open if you do that sort of thing.
I clicked (baited) on the link to find out how exactly I'm being screwed in private by my evil kindle, and got ELEVEN paragraphs of what-seems-like AI-generated waffle about how evil amazon are re. privacy, Of those 11 paragraphs, ONE is meant to expose the vile traits in kindle, I suppose. Only it doesn't, though it does include a gem: 'There's no Alexa built in, so you don't need to worry about voice requests being tracked or Alexa skills snooping on you.' Followed by a revelation that you can turn off wifi, etc, so they don't slurp info, etc, etc, noshitsherlock. All those texts, shouldn't have been generated. I know amazon are evil, my wife knows amazon are evil, even my teenage kids already know amazon are evil and there's _nothing_ new ithere, just waffle. People who buy books and let themselves by sheared for data by amazon in exchange for convenience, won't read it, because it's neither interesting, nor scary, and people who care about privacy know what to do.
Using various government penalties as a guide to privacy violations isn't very reliable -- its just a shakedown disguised as legal proceedings and the penalties get lost in the "cost of doing business" (i.e. we all end up paying, its a bit like vat on top of VAT). You're not going to get away with hiding your purchases from market research unless you do all your shopping at the corner store and pay exclusively in cash -- everyone tracks your purchases and F2F stores often use financial incentives (as in 'screw you something rotten if you don't conform') to make sure they know who you are and what you're buying.
The only real defense against this is to make sure the information they collect is useless. This probably won't stop them from collecting but it will confuse the system. (You know its working when the adverts sourced on websites are for ridiculously irrelevant things.)
Incidentally, buying dead tree books doesn't get you out of the system. I regularly buy these, both new and used, because if I'm paying real money for books I want a real book for my money. I use the Kindle for older, public domain, texts. (Its the same with music -- I don't buy downloads even though all I do when I receive physical media is rip it to a server (but at least I get a FLAC).
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