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.
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