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Living Room / Re: Why ebooks are bad for you
« on: June 12, 2011, 05:48 PM »The device is still capable of tying personally identifiable information about you to the book, and remotely deleting or modifying it. There are no laws that I'm aware of that would keep Amazon, or any other company, from doing either of these things, or simply recording your behavior quietly, as the collected data awaits a sales opportunity or subpoena. Can't do this on a massive scale with physical books.-doctorfrog (June 11, 2011, 11:29 PM)
There are outlets other than b&n and amazon for purchasing non-drm books. And if one of them actually modified something on the device that you didn't purchase from them, that would be a very bad thing for them (and pretty stupid also, as most would have backups - or in the case of a couple of outlets you can re-download).-wraith808 (June 12, 2011, 08:50 AM)
Correct. However, your activity can still be monitored and stored. What if something you downloaded one day was determined to fit a sought-after terrorist profile tomorrow? It wouldn't matter if it had DRM or not, or where you got it, the device itself has an umbilical to somewhere else, and there isn't anything stopping it from quietly storing records of your activity. The policy attached to devices is cause for concern as well as the files themselves.
I'm not personally worried about this happening to me, but that doesn't mean it isn't something that isn't going to happen to anyone, ever. Libraries stood up against US government demands to turn over book borrowing records. Verizon and other telecoms didn't. Would an ebook retailer?