Might be worth noting that you can opt out of their data collection (on the e-reader, at a minimum) as well. Settings > Device Options > Advanced Options > Privacy or in the device management console in your account on amazon.com

> Highlighting or tapping any word will send the requests with the text to Bing Translate and Wikipedia, as well as back to Amazon.

Is there a reason why that text needs to be sent before the user clicks the "translate" button? Is there a reason why it needs to be sent to Amazon?

Yes - UX latency. I would expect this kind of thing to take a few thousand milliseconds, and shaving off a few hundred milliseconds from between when the user highlights text and when they select "translate" is significant. The fact that this data is being sent to Wikipedia of all places further signals that the usage is likely to be innocuous.

Do I think that this is globally a good design decision? No, for both engineering and privacy reasons. There's definitely no good reason why it should be sent to Amazon at all.

I was wracking my brain on this, and all I could come up with was "to independently verify the invoicing for Bing translations" and "how many times are people accessing the definition/translation and not highlighting". So, analytics, not something that explicitly benefits the user.

For example, Amazon doesn't need to know where I am when I request a definition or translation. If they're concerned about usage, they only need to know how many times I actually used one or both of those features per day, per week, or month. They don't need to know instantly every single time a word is highlighted.

How? For all we know, it isn't granular - it might be aggregated at the server level to hide specific user's actions. But they'd still need to be sending in the data from the device to the server.

Also it should really be opt in. Our at least opt out. I hate Amazon looking over my shoulder while reading a book.

[1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/

If you want to see what I mean by the ghosting of user interface elements being more perceptible, try using KOReader. The ghosting after using a menu can be quite noticable (at least on Kobo devices, which are based on the same technology).

And the fact that the screens are slow should be motivation to make the rest of the system as responsive as possible. A good software engineer will work around bottlenecks, not shrug their shoulders and introduce new ones.

If the refresh rate is 5 seconds, and the network response time is 500ms, than eliminating the 500ms response time means we are 10% less likely to miss the train. On average, the time for the text to appear on the screen decreases by 500ms.

All this assumes the refreshes happening on a static schedule. If the software can trigger the refresh, then it’s a lot simpler. The 500ms improvement in latency would apply equally to every engagement with the translate feature.

I like this, as a user. I don't want MORE buttons to tap through when I'm trying to define or translate a word. Especially since the Kindle eink screen and UI is not the most responsive.

If it took 2 taps, I would switch platforms.

Good tip, I'm going to give this a whirl. Unfortunately, all the network calls add a significant amount of latency even if one didn't care about privacy.

It's good for cases exactly like this - devices where you don't have control over /etc/hosts (or where you have lots of them and don't want to keep the hosts files in sync). I use it for my Samsung TV to keep them from phoning home (but still letting me use apps)

Edit: you can also set up a DoH endpoint and filter traffic while also allowing Encrypted SNI to work

Is the pihole a DNS server or a firewall? Sibling comments suggest it's a DNS server, but that doesn't answer this need at all -- if you don't control /etc/hosts, you don't control the device. It can do its resolution however it wants. Most obviously, it can include the domain names you don't want it to reach in its own /etc/hosts file, which you just said you didn't control.

Snooping on users during e-commerce transactions, sure.

But recording user's detailed interactions with every ebook? I hope that's a big surprise to your average Kindle user.

It would be great to see a data request response and how much of this data is retained and for how long. It's clearly not anonymized at the request level.

Very easy to see a future where just reading certain books or reading certain books too many times could flag you as dangerous or be used to support a mental incompetence hearing resulting in loss of rights.

I doubt it. Here are some features the Kindle phone app intentionally advertises to the user:

- prediction of how long the book will take to complete, based on your reading rate

- tracking of whether or not you read anything on any given day

It can't just track the very last page in the book that you read, because authors were gaming that by encouraging people to immediately skip to the last page of very large works they didn't otherwise care about. Instead there's some kind of heuristic that tries to figure out if you've more-or-less-normally read the book.

It is just a shame that you have no options. Had to quickly search if my kindle has GPS capabilities. Gladly it does not.

"Kindle Collects a Surprisingly Large Amount of Data" is a completely honest and in my opinion correct statement. So yes, companies are dishonest in their data collection practices and responding with exaggeration is maybe wrong. But I do care more about the data collection issue.

The Kindle has an option to "sync last page", which you can turn off -- that sounds like it could be exactly what you're asking for, but more experimentation would be needed to know for sure.

I didn't see any mention of this config in the OP, aside from mentioning that the feature exists, so it's unclear whether the data being sent is used just for that feature, or whether less data is sent if the sync feature is turned off.

Note that it doesn't just suck because you're giving up using the Kindle itself. It also sucks because you'll be losing your entire collection of Ebooks, which are DRM-encumbered and can not be ported to other non-Amazon devices/platforms/apps.

This makes it extremely difficult for other privacy-respecting platforms to compete on the market, since using them requires the user to either break the law by stripping DRM from their books, or to abandon their entire purchased library.

Future TOS/EULA/Privacy changes that might not have been in place when a user originally bought their Kindle can thus be forced on them by making it prohibitively expensive for the user to opt out or change ecosystems.

I'm seeing conflicting things online that range from "just hit this toggle and you're good", to "you can disable some of it, but not all", to "this only opts out of data processing for ads/analytics".

If there really is an option to disable the collection entirely, then that would mitigate a large number of the problems I have with that practice. Of course I'd love for it to be opt-in, but just giving the option would still be better than many other devices like Smart TVs.

It does mean that if you want to be absolutely sure your Kindle isn't phoning home, you can't use the Kindle browser, and you need a laptop or similar to download the things you want to transfer over. It's not a perfect solution for everyone, but for the typical HN reader who is concerned about telemetry, it should work.

I download the ebooks themselves using the Kindle application on my computer (if I'm using Amazon to get them, which I don't always), and then use Calibre to manage/import/convert/strip DRM from them. I don't need the sync functionality, or to be able to look things up on the internet (not being able to do that is a feature as far as I'm concerned!). I just want text on a page. I like the "e-reader" experience, and I have no desire to read books on a phone or tablet. I have one Kindle, and it comes with me if I think I'm going to have the opportunity to read when I'm out of the house.

Of course, if you're using Amazon to get your books they'll still build a profile of your reading habits, but there's something about tracking the exact parts of a book I'm reading, the bits I might linger on or reread, which feels extra intrusive to me, and which I categorically don't want.

I also never connect my Kindle to the internet. (The phone app does connect.) You don't have to allow it to connect to Amazon once. Mine has never connected.

There's no motive on Amazon's part to do it this way, it would be a hassle to implement, possibly not great for battery life, and I expect that users don't care much.

Frankly, I don't care much, in practice. In principle, yes; everything which can be kept private, should be. But Amazon knowing what page I'm on just doesn't discomfit me, the way the prospect of some company being able to read my messages does.

The most common response about online privacy is "what does is matter if X knows Y? I've got nothing to hide".

People already don't care, and I guarantee they also don't care that Amazon knows what page they are on in the book the are reading. There are much bigger issues to focus on

Or, you can trust that a position in a book (bookmarks, notes, etc.) is not sensitive information that really needs to be encrypted. This is my - perhaps overly pragmatic - position.

Yeah, it's not like Amazon can afford security experts to work on this or anything.

>Or, you can trust that a position in a book (bookmarks, notes, etc.) is not sensitive information that really needs to be encrypted.

This is an ignorant position that has been proven wrong over, and over, and over again. Private data should be secure by default, because otherwise eventually someone will figure out how to abuse it. This is a lesson form bazillion fraud schemes and social engineering hacks everyone in tech should have learned by now.

If all data is secured by default, then the identification of PII is not about deciding to secure that data, it is about identifying where we might impose (and often this isn't required, but now we can consider it) additional UX burden or complexity in order to add _additional_ security.

why not? if i open a book on my phone that i stopped reading on my kindle, i want it to open to the last location i read to on my kindle. not ten pages back because it doesn't sync data every page turn for some imaginary privacy benefit.

Why is location needed for that? Shouldn't a device id and account work just fine? I don't need to share my location to sync other devices.

And, good question. It would be nice, though I'm sure they've buried it in their multi-page privacy doc somewhere.

EDIT: No, it's not opt-in. Reading failure on my part.

https://www.epubor.com/whispersync-for-kindle.html

"And "Whispersync for Books" is enabled on Kindle Fire, Kindle devices and apps by default."

https://smallbusiness.chron.com/amazon-whispernet-work-58992...

"Whispersync is on by default in all new Kindles, but you can turn off the option on individual devices if you have multiple readers attached to your account."

https://ebookfriendly.com/how-to-disable-data-collection-kin...

"How to disable data collection on your Kindle or Fire device"

That said, given that it provides a high value to the end user (I use it daily), I personally don't mind.

But yeah, the Kindle iOS app is crap in many ways - the one that bugs me is how hot it makes my phone. I mean, WTF?