Re:What Can We Learn from Barnes and Noble's Surprising Turn...
by kcartlidge on Thursday December 29, 2022 @08:05AM
(#34172207)
It does contain telemetry, as you say. But with a throwaway account on the device, and no payment method or other details on it, I don't really care. Plus unless I'm doing an update check (about once a year) it's always offline. I recognise it's probably still gathered info and is sending it in a bulk catch-up, but again I don't really care.
For the registration requirement you're right, but as I'm not replacing their software then by the simple expedient of a dummy account I don't need to do anything to the device, even the DB entry, and personally I'd rather not bother. Nice to know, though, thanks.
In the US and many other Western countries (mostly forced by the US), circumventing or otherwise removing DRM is illegal in and of itself, even for personal use.
I like Kobo's devices for the most part, but I've only ever used KOReader on them. Kobo software seems to contain telemetry. As a side note, you can circumvent the registration requirement after wiping the reader by inserting an entry to a sqlite3 db, thus allowing your reader to be unaccounted for by Kobo or Google Analytics.