Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

This statement - &quot;None of these requests appear to be used for customer features like last read location.&quot; - bugs me, because it&#x27;s fairly obviously false, and detracts from the real concerns.<p>To sync a &quot;last read page&quot; across devices, you need to send a location back to Amazon. It&#x27;s also appropriate to tie a location to a device, so you can pick the appropriate device to sync your position from. And, when you highlight a word, the translation, definition, and wiki page is brought up, so of course it&#x27;s being sent to bing and wikipedia.<p>There are valid concerns here (there&#x27;s too much information being sent overall - the location data doesn&#x27;t need to be sent with every page turn, for example), but these concerns are being buried behind FUD about none of this data needing to be transmitted.<p>EDIT: Can I also point out the ironic nature of griping about Amazon&#x27;s analytics collection while running an analytics suite on the webpage yourself?<p>zql=Kindle%20Collects%20a%20Surprisingly%20Large%20Amount%20of%20Data pqo=1 xfg=1 xqi=946451 h=8 m=58 s=11 eqm=https%3A%2F%2Fnullsweep.com%2Fkindle-collects-a-surprisingly-large-amount-of-data%2F uel=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2F nvn=b271bb7f9e0fe444 xpx=1598364493 bqq=2 oso=0 ajh=1598366510 lyz=1598364493 _ref=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2F euq=0 cookie=1 res=1080x1920 fpr=429 rlp=xnxpI1

As a former Kindle developer, I can say that most of what&#x27;s mentioned in this article are metrics used to understand how the features are used (bookmarks, highlights, dictionnary, etc.), how much they are used, and in which country. This allows the teams to focus on features that are actively used, and sometimes lead to discontinuing features that see little to no use. Hope that helps.

I have quite often seen people here and on other tech forums assume that purchasing a Kindle means being locked into Amazon&#x27;s ecosystem, giving up personal details, and having the risk that your books might be deleted. But you don&#x27;t have to use the Kindle&#x27;s internet connectivity: I have owned three generations of Kindle, and with each one I activated airplane mode the second I unboxed the device and I never turned airplane mode off. All my ebooks come from sources other than Amazon (mainly LibGen, for example), and they can be easily transferred over to the Kindle by USB because the Kindle appears as any ordinary USB drive to a computer.

This is a bit unfortunate, because the kindle paperwhite is just phenomenal. It&#x27;s easy on my eyes and it&#x27;s a godsend for traveling. I suppose the solution here is to just keep it in offline mode when not syncing books.<p>[edit] as others have noted, it&#x27;s possible to permanently use offline mode, and transfer books via usb cable.<p>&gt; Unfortunately, in order to use a non-Kindle application, I have to buy DRM-Free books.<p>One can remove DRM for amazon&#x27;s ebook format (.azw3 ?) via some python scripts. You didn&#x27;t hear it from me though.

This is only one reason why I absolutely love my Kobo Aura HD, it&#x27;s never been connected to WiFi. Its storage device is a standard SD card which can be swapped for a larger one. Oh, and it&#x27;s not giving money to Amazon which is always a big win for me. It also happens to be a super nice piece of kit, and it has my warmest recommendations.

I think you mean &quot;Predictably&quot; rather than &quot;Surprisingly&quot;.

I&#x27;m sure someone like me always has the same &quot;hot take&quot; in every thread regarding this, but I honestly still love reading physical books. After spending a day weary of interacting with screens all day, there is something nice about tapping in to this activity that humans have done for hundreds of years. Sure, e-ink is easier on the eyes, but isolating myself with a good book can be a near spiritual experience.

It would be quite interesting to know how this data is actually used on Amazon&#x27;s servers. It reminds me of the criticisms of government data collection programs, that they just hoover up every bit of data that&#x27;s available without actually knowing what to do with it. Suppose you train some AI to predict what pages in a book will be most engaging to the reader. Since your interface to the book is still just going to be something where people can turn the pages what are you actually going to do with that information? It&#x27;s a massive sacrifice of the privacy of the user for small gains at best in getting insight into the user&#x27;s behavior. I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if this information is sitting in a database somewhere at Amazon completely unused.<p>The philosophy of Amazon appears to be to do as much as possible in the hopes that one day it will be useful. This is at odds with the principle of philosophical skepticism, that because we can&#x27;t be sure of the consequences of our actions we should strive to do as little as possible. The data could be hacked and leak out, for example. There is tremendous uncertainty around things like that.

I formed my opinion before clicking the article, already working out some comments in my mind like &quot;who&#x27;s surprised?&quot; After reading the article though, surprisingly my opinion changed. This doesn&#x27;t seem all that bad. I don&#x27;t doubt that Amazon is over-collecting, but the samples he posted seem like it&#x27;s just information for syncing reading position and settings. Of all the nefarious things Amazon does with data, I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s one of them.

I did some research on early Android sending a bunch of data back to Google&#x27;s servers, a few months later the information was encoded&#x2F;encrypted before being sent over the wire. I&#x27;d be curious if the next app version of Kindle started obfuscating what it was sending back home.

Why would you leave on wifi on an e-ink kindle, when not actively downloading a book? The battery lasts 3-4x as long with it disabled (on my 3rd gen device at least).<p>I doubt most users need a real-time sync of their book location to the cloud, unless they read on multiple devices.<p>Also, if you use the kindle to get loaned&#x2F;library books on this particular model, they aren&#x27;t removed even if the due-date is exceeded until you reconnect to wifi, which has been handy at times...

I’m not surprised, but I suggest the Kobo e-reader to the OP. Can use multiple formats, easy to upload books to it, and some models have expandable memory. You can completely disconnect it from the internet if you want.

I tried to read the first link in the article, the link in the sentence<p>&quot;There have been cases of Amazon removing specific books from customer accounts (and kindles).&quot;<p>It redirected me from:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;io9.gizmodo.com&#x2F;amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-the-kindle-5317703" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;io9.gizmodo.com&#x2F;amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-th...</a><p>to<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gizmodo.com.au&#x2F;amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-the-kindle-5317703?r=US" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gizmodo.com.au&#x2F;amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from...</a><p>So it seems I am not allowed to read up about this reference.<p>Or some underpaid developer messed up the redirects.<p>Either way this issue about data collection is interesting in its own right, but this other issue of global redirects also feels important, but I only say that as someone who tried to follow the news here.

Fascinating investigation and good article.<p>But this doesn&#x27;t actually surprise anybody, right?

&gt; <i>Unfortunately, in order to use a non-Kindle application, I have to buy DRM-Free books</i><p>No. All you have to do is own an old Kindle (buy one on ebay if necessary). Then you can download DRM protected Kindle files from Amazon for this old device, and Calibre and the appropriate plugin can un-DRM them, and transform them in any other format (epub, mobi, text, rtf...) for you to use on your app of choice.<p>It&#x27;s certainly better to buy DRM-free books directly if you can find them, but the above solution works quite well.

I use my Kindle Paperwhite completely offline. I factory reset it and haven&#x27;t connected it to WiFi since and just side load what I need(I did have to strip the DRM from my Kindle books to side load them on the unregistered device). I never really used the online features when it was registered previously and kept it in airplane mode to help with batter life. Another bonus is that if a freshly reset Kindle never connects to the internet, you never get the ads.

How are the alternatives. Although i will miss my collection of books but I&#x27;m going to be in the market for the next ebook reader.

Would love to replace my Kindle with another device. Any recommendations? - Also, I appreciate a local file on the Kindle that logs all my highlights (this file is called `My Clippings.txt‘. I parse that file and have a wonderful summary of the books I read. Any other ebook reader that creates a file like that?

It will make people uncomfortable, but this is standard practice in terms of event collection for analytics. Many articles here write about discovery from the side of a particular app or site.<p>If people reviewed some analytics solutions (many trials are available), then they&#x27;d see how pervasive this is and what product vendors are encouraging. The like&#x27;s of Amazon have much more scrutiny around the use of data collected than those of smaller organizations. Obviously, they wield great market power so the concerns are broader, but an attacker has a much better chance of raiding smaller developers for volumes of data with much the same fidelity.

Some users also buy a Kindle which is subsidized by ads? I pay to avoid this and change privacy settings..<p>If you are using a device designed to market to you - they almost all run ads and collect analytics. I guess this is technically not a user facing feature, but it provides some user benefit (cheaper price).<p>Does anyone know sales breakdowns? If everyone is concerned about privacy &#x2F; not being marketed too I guess the versions with ads are not selling. But I&#x27;ve been surprised not that marketing platforms collect data (authors website did) but that most users don&#x27;t care about this &quot;abuse&quot; that the author is so concerned about.

The early Kindles didn&#x27;t do this. It used to annoy me to no end that I&#x27;d have to manually tell my Kindle to sync when I was done reading.<p>Originally, I didn&#x27;t realize this. I learned this when I&#x27;d pull out my phone in a waiting room, or on a train, only to not be anywhere near where I last read the book on my physical Kindle.<p>Now, I&#x27;m quite happy that Kindle syncs aggressively. I use an old phone to read in my hot tub, and it&#x27;s great that the book opens up to the last place I read it, no matter which phone I&#x27;m using.

I can&#x27;t find a reference to it now, but I recently read something referencing the massive quantities of kindle data amazon give you when making a GDPR data subject access request. I think it was something like 100k rows of data for one user.<p>Perhaps I should do that myself.<p>Edit: You can request your kindle data here (UK version): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.co.uk&#x2F;gp&#x2F;privacycentral&#x2F;dsar&#x2F;preview.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.co.uk&#x2F;gp&#x2F;privacycentral&#x2F;dsar&#x2F;preview.html</a>

Kindle is a great tech (e-ink) with a terribly expensive ecosystem (amazon store) for books.<p>I load all the books I get directly from my computer (Mostly from project Gutenberg).<p>Turning airplane mode on permanently now.

Are these requests sent to a separate domain? I may have missed it in the article but it’d be great to know whether we could null route these without disrupting functionality.

I’ve found similar concerns in an official church scripture app which I will not name.<p>It was sending an enormous amount of data back to the church including what the user was reading and for how long, everything the user highlighted or bookmarked etc.<p>It was enough to really question the need for such data.<p>I really believe that if that data served a legitimate purpose to the functionality of the app (which I’m sure a lot of it did) then the data should have been saved locally on the users device.

As much dang money as Amazon makes off kindle, why are they also spying? I guess &quot;because they can&quot; will always be a useful refrain, but I really wish there was plain english version of what information they collect at any given company&#x2F;web app&#x2F;mobile app&#x2F;OS kind of like the attorney general&#x27;s warning. Not something that is 20 miles long with legalese that any non-attorney can decypher

After I put Pihole on the network, wife&#x27;s kindle was almost immediately the biggest offender.<p>That said, the article appears to list activity type ( which is problematic in itself -- time stamp + person is reading now ). I can see a legitimate use for it, but I also hate the idea of being profiled in that way.<p>To be perfectly honest, Kindle does not seem to pull more than average Android phone ( thought that is problematic in itself ).

I have a 2015 Kindle Paperwhite. I&#x27;ve put it on flight mode the day it arrived and it never went online again. Yes, loading new books takes slightly more effort (I use USB transfer with Calibre) but the peace of mind I get is more than worth it. Unlike OP, Amazon can neither track my reading habits (beyond my ebook purchases) nor delete anything from my Kindle.

That doesn&#x27;t seem like a large amount of data.<p>The character analytics stuff is probably contractual obligations they have to publishers. The publishers probably want to double check the way people read as well and ensure that they are paid out correctly.<p>The other logging, as someone else mentioned is probably analytics for their own product development.

I was always curious why Amazon&#x27;s Dynamo was co-developed for Kindle. Kindle didn&#x27;t seem like the sort of product that required its own scale-free key-value store. An object store, certainly (for the books themselves); and maybe a relatively-mundane sharded key-value store, for read positions.<p>But this kind of explains it, to me.

Amazon loses when users take the discounted kindle, never enable wifi and source books from libgen. These users would be addressing their privacy concerns and saving money. Perhaps it isn&#x27;t the largest market, but Amazon isn&#x27;t exactly incentivizing participation with these privacy policies.

This is why I am skeptical of Kindle. It&#x27;s Orwellian to know all the details of a person&#x27;s reading habits, and all the minutia of a reading session.<p>This is why I download e-books from the dark web and read them on an airgapped machine, free from The-eye-of-Amazon

&gt; The local IP is the only item on here that bothers me, though I couldn&#x27;t find any other local network information that would be problematic.<p>It seems that the author is not really that surprised with the amount of data being collected.

So one way to avoid all data gathering might be to keep your Kindle on airplane mode permanently and load&#x2F;remove books via USB. Battery would last longer too. It also kills ads on the cheaper version of the Kindle.

What is the surprise? Who doesn&#x27;t collect data? As long as that data is anonymized and used for improving their product(s), I am fine. It will be scary if the data is used for selling ads&#x2F;data itself.

OT: What is the app used in the screenshot to capture the HTTP requests?

I had a funny situation with kindle. It was connecting to the internet all the time, I enabled airplane mode and then it started complaining about it all the time.<p>Out of spite I added password to my wifi (I didn&#x27;t have any and I even named my hotspot smth like &quot;free&quot; for my neighbors to use, wouldn&#x27;t do that now).<p>To my surprise, some ~8months later I discovered my kindle to happily connect to my wifi. I&#x27;m pretty sure I would never enter the password there, because the kindle was the reason I added password to begin with. Maybe there is some more sane explanation than &quot;kindle bruteforced my wifi&quot;, like a bug or some nuance in authorization protocol?<p>edit: it happened 7 years ago with kindle 2013 paperwhite.

Given how data driven Amazon is this is not really a surprise, is it?

Our local library does drive up pick up. Obviously not as instant as a download... but man it is nice to leave the house for a few minutes. Kills two birds with one stone.

Cool investigation. Thanks for sharing. Have you analyzed what data Marvin collects in each session? Before switching I&#x27;d want to see a comparison.

Just wait until they learn about the &quot;behavioral reading&quot; data collected by, oh I don&#x27;t know, virtually every media site on the Internet.

Most of the time my Kindle is on airplane mode - does anybody know if my Kindle will still send this data later all at once, when the wifi is on?

Surprisingly?<p>Legitimate or not, it seems obvious that Amazon would be heavily monitoring device use, especially with the ad-supplemented devices.

Can anyone provide a viable open source or non-privacy invasive alternative that isn’t something I need to assemble myself?

This is covered in the terms of service (you read those before using the device, right?):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;help&#x2F;customer&#x2F;display.html?nodeId=GQFYXZHZB2H629WN" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;help&#x2F;customer&#x2F;display.html?nodeId=...</a><p>That doc also includes instructions for how to opt-out of this collection:<p>&gt; you may opt out of processing of your personal data relating to the use of your Kindle e-reader collected by the operating system of that device (&quot;device usage data&quot;) for marketing and product improvement purposes via All Settings &gt; Device Options &gt; Advanced Options &gt; Privacy. If you turn this setting off, we will stop processing this device usage data for the purposes of serving you customized marketing offers and improving our products and features. Turning this setting off will not affect... your ability to use features of the device, such as data syncing or backup features or Special Offers we display if you purchased a device that includes Special Offers, as we will continue to collect and process your data to deliver those features to you<p>I&#x27;m interested to see whether this sort of biometric&#x2F;behavioural data will ever be thought of as Personal Data under GDPR (since I bet you can identify someone from their browsing behaviour, just like you can using walking gait and typing cadence). If that was the case you&#x27;d need to present an opt-in when you first booted the device, which I think would resolve the complaints from most folks in this thread.

&gt; The local IP is the only item on here that bothers me<p>What! Why? What about all the other data?

What irks me about it is that Amazon doesn&#x27;t give me access to that data.

I just turn off the Kindle&#x27;s wifi unless I actually need it.

Just use airplane mode? Will also increase the battery life.

How is anyone still using a Kindle after the 1984 scandal?

As a shareholder, this is disappointing to read.

Maybe I am getting less fervent about privacy and data security but I don&#x27;t see these metrics as PII.<p>This is a complete whataboutism but you gave Amazon a lot more information when you purchased the kindle from them.<p>I think the answer is Amazon should add an option to turn this off.

definitely going to be selling my kindle now...

an interesting article<p>thanks for sharing this<p>thankfully Kindle is not selling very much (relatively) so it is not a big issue if they collect a lot of data

How was this achieved? I didn’t realize a Kindle supported HTTP proxys or installing root certs?