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FastCompany: E-books are fast becoming tools of corporate surveillance (www.fastcompany.com)

submitted 11 months ago by dominiquec@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[-] DashboTreeFrog@discuss.online 119 points 11 months ago

I honestly hadn't considered that eBook licensing data could be used in the way they describe in the article. EBooks becoming part of big data surveillance somehow feels especially disheartening to me.

Lately I feel like I've been duped for years since I used to believe strongly in the phrase "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" but it feels like with every paid product or service nowadays you're STILL the product...

But a pirate is always free 🏴‍☠️

[-] Deceptichum@kbin.social 29 points 11 months ago

Yar har, fiddle de dee
Being a pirate is alright to be
Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free
You are a pirate!

[-] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 22 points 11 months ago

Lately I feel like I've been duped for years since I used to believe strongly in the phrase "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" but it feels like with every paid product or service nowadays you're STILL the product...

Yep, I take issue with that phrase as well for two reasons.

like you say, most of the time you pay and your data is still harvested, because if you're not collecting all that valuable data your shareholders will demand to know why you're ignoring such a massive revenue stream.
plenty of stuff IS genuinely free without you being the product. FOSS as a general rule will not track you and you aren't the product.

Now I appreciate that people who frequent Lemmy probably know about that exception to the rule, but plenty of people don't, and I've seen people refuse to use open source software because they believe it being truly free is too good to be true, so they stick with an inferior paid-for alternative thinking some black box proprietary code is more private and secure so long as you paid for it.

[-] SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 13 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Pirate the ebook, buy a paper copy to support the author (they generally even earn more per paper copy, iirc). Ideally at a local book store, as they are a dying breed as well.

Don't like dead trees around? Gift it to someone. Or ask the local library if they want it

[-] mrcrilly@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Excellent advice. I'd add: if you cannot gift it, or the library doesn't want it, give it to a charity shop or book club.

[-] LWD@lemm.ee 45 points 11 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

deleted

[-] Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 79 points 11 months ago

Piracy is becoming the safe option, think about that.

[-] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 33 points 11 months ago

Yeah, in some cases piracy feels more straightforward and honest than having to sign away all my rights and data so I can do something as simple as reading a book.

[-] Uranium3006@kbin.social 30 points 11 months ago

It used to be you worried about getting a virus from pirated books, now the corpo options are provably malware

[-] porksoda@lemmy.world 13 points 11 months ago

Not just probably, they've literally done it. Look up the Sony rootkit scandal.

[-] Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 15 points 11 months ago

They said "provably", not "probably", so the good news is we all already agree :)

[-] AFLYINTOASTER@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago

Well politic'd, friend

[-] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago

You don't even need to go back to the early 2000s Bertelsman-Sony copy protection scandal.

Millions of people install rootkits on their PCs today in the form of anti-cheat software that has a greater level of system access than Bertelsman/Sony ever had.

Ring 0 level kernel access. Code that can be executed with above admin level privileges and do anything it wants to with your system. Shit, it could reflash firmware on your PC if it wanted to, allowing malicious code to survive OS reinstalls.

And not only that - it's not even effective as an anti-cheat solution, leading to the question of why they bother with it anyway? Data harvesting? Security theatre?

[-] piecat@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah that's spooky. Could we even tell if data is being harvested?

I know there's also secret op codes and hardware. Real spooky shit. We really need open source hardware.

[-] muse@kbin.social 12 points 11 months ago

👨‍🚀🏴‍☠️🔫👩‍🚀🏴‍☠️

[-] Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 7 points 11 months ago

Oh no... I've believed the propaganda uncritically for most of my life and am just now realising how absurd it was to ever trust the establishment's narrative.

[-] LWD@lemm.ee 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

deleted

[-] Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 4 points 11 months ago

Idk, I think it's normal to believe proaganda. We all do, and sometimes it's even true. I'm just commenting on it because I'm so used to automatically criticising the mainstream message, so I'm usually on the other side of this discussion. But for a long time I worried about viruses from piracy, but it only just dawned on me that I am now far less afraid of that than of corporate proprietary spyware.

It never occurred to me before that of course the pirates are more trustworthy, they always have been. The mainstream propaganda is so pervasive that it's going to leave little bits stuck in your mind for a long time.

[-] systemglitch@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

I'm still wary of some pirated content, but when using the right trackers, that fear basically disappears.

[-] DarkPassenger@lemmy.world 22 points 11 months ago

Never considered my library was spying on me. Spent years hyping the library system to save money on ebooks. Does pirating all your ebooks solve the problem or does tracking also take place on the e-reader side too?

[-] uninvitedguest@lemmy.ca 18 points 11 months ago

I used a Kindle, but get the lion's share of my ebooks from Anna's archive. Books are often delivered to my Kindle through the email to Kindle service.

I have no illusions that every single book I read is fed through Amazon's data machine. The Kindle estimates the time to completion of a book based on your reading speed - everything that it could possibly interpolated from your reading... Will be. And you can bet it will be sold, or at the very least advertised to you on Amazon.

[-] DarkPassenger@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

I do the same by feeding my kindle via email. Got my kindle but wonder if there are more privacy friendly readers

[-] emerica@sh.itjust.works 9 points 11 months ago

I have a Kobo, you can set it to “sideload mode” and you don’t need an account of any kind. It disables the store and all that and I never turn WiFi on so it’s completely offline.

I use Calibre, an amazing FOSS ebook manager, to sync my books to the Kobo.

Pretty much just download whatever from Anna’s Archive, throw it in Calibre and get it to fetch all the artwork and metadata if I want it and sync to the Kobo.

Calibre takes a little getting used to but it’s not too bad, it’s also extremely powerful once you learn more about it.

[-] MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

No ned to pirate. Just send your ebooks through Calibre to remove DRM and put them on your privacy friendly* reader. Maybe don't buy them all from Amazon in the future.

* may need some work. PocketBook doesn't track you, Kobo is pretty good too, Onyx must be debloated to not send telemetry (like any Android device), Amazon devices are Android too?

[-] DarkPassenger@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

Can you point me to a good guide to set up calibre to remove drm?

[-] clubizarre@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

This is the method I use for my Kindle (and some Google Books) purchases.

[-] Synthead@lemmy.world 19 points 11 months ago

Keep your ebook readers dumb and use them offline. Load them up with books and read them.

[-] kzhe@lemm.ee 11 points 11 months ago

Pirating and Librera or e-reader nevernconnected to internet.

[-] banneryear1868@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago

Ebooks are so fucking annoying to use with licensed books, like anyone who has a mom that got an ebook reader knows what a pain it is to set it up with a library and teach her how to use it, then you have device restrictions etc.

Just another example of media where pirating is so easy and so much better. You download an incredibly small single file, copy to the device, and you have the book, easy. If I can get it from the library and pay for that service with my taxes, if I "check out" the book and then pirate it, there's no ethical issues with pirating it.

Personally though I prefer either audiobooks or hard copies, I just find the ebook readers too annoying to use and manage. I'd honestly rather buy a book then donate or lend it to someone when I'm done with it. In high school through college I had a job where I drove for about 20 hours every week and I basically went through all the classics in audiobook form and then got in to popular history and philosophy then into more academic territory, was surprising what I was able to get in audiobook format and just became accustomed to it.

[-] crackajack@reddthat.com 6 points 11 months ago

Thankfully, the only ebooks I have only gotten so far are classics from Gutenberg website.

[-] nick@midwest.social 1 points 11 months ago

Ayuuuup. Libgen, calibre, and Apple Books for me these days.

I’ve bought around 1000 kindle books over the years, but that shit ended this year when I found out about this stuff. Spent a week stripping the drm from all my purchases (the ones Amazon didn’t burn up in the memory hole, anyway; bout a dozen of the books I paid for are no longer available for download), adding them to calibre, and backing the data up.

Now I use the apple books app on my phone to read them. It’s not as convenient, but fuck Amazon.

this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023

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