His entire intern project was a small piece of the system being built to detect abuse of these SIMs and stop it. Given it's a decade later now, I doubt it still works or works for very long.
For the Lime SIMs, there was a day when the pipe was turned off - I can imagine it was the day someone looked into their twillio billing in detail..
I'd rather work for another evil corporation like Mac Donalds than work to remove features from devices people have already bought. When your company is selling surveillance tools to individuals masquerading as e-book readers and you have to struggle to just install a libre Operating System, it's not even close to fair that you get to use the SIM card Amazon planted in your device in whichever way you please.
It's a bit like when Facebook wanted to bring "Internet" into countries where bandwidth is expensive, by branding unlimited access to Facebook as "Internet". Having access to the network should give you full access to the network (net neutrality). Having acquired hardware should give you full access to put your own system (right to repair).
It's only logical that if you paid for a device, and some money of that went into providing you free Internet services, you get to do what you want with both the device and the Internet access and Amazon should have no control over what you do because they CHOSE to sell that to you in an attempt to exploit your attention and control what you can read. That relation was abusive to start with, and that some people find little benefits in it does not bother me from an ethical perspective.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106989...
Do you see the absurdity of your argument? It makes perfect sense to criticize something you find profoundly unethical even when you're not directly concerned by the situation.
Alice: "Don't work for Foo vineyard. Foo vineyard puts poison in the wine that people buy without them knowing it." Bob: "Just don't buy Foo's wine yourself, then." (Millions of people are still being poisoned drinking Foo wine and would probably buy a different wine if they were informed about it.)
However, if you morally object to anyone purchasing Amazon's Kindle on the basis of surveillance capitalism, I'm not sure if arguing over limiting data use with their SIM cards is the best use of your energy.
They're arguing 'I bought a product which doesn't offer feature X and I'm mad that it turns out it can't do X'. Use your common sense. Buy a product that explicitly does have X if you want X.
People ask why do right to repair laws need to exist despite John Deere having thousands of competitors for tractors? Similarly, the market for e-readers and smart phones should allow limitless competition.
How many e-readers companies could negotiate great terms for e-ink displays and world wide 3g coverage? If any of them did, might Amazon automatically get their negotiated best price as part of the clauses Amazon could negotiate given it has most of the volume?
If Amazon and Sony get the best price on e-ink displays, Amazon and b&n on US networks, and Amazon and Kobo on European networks, who is actually competing with Amazon to sell an ereader with world wide coverage?
So you paid money for the product. The product is technically capable to fulfill your greatest needs and desire as someone who purchased it, yet it has built-in mechanisms to enforce the will of someone else on your life.
Would you find it normal to have screws sold with Ikea furniture that are made so that they can only screw Ikea furniture? Or gasoline sold with a BMW car that only works in BMW cars? Or bread sold with a butter that can only go on that kind of bread? It makes no sense, as interoperability is a fundamental property of most things around us, going against that is an insult and an injury to all of humanity, and to our planet that's ever more polluted because our overlords have decided we should keep on producing and throwing away hardware instead of repairing/re-purposing things as we used to not long ago.
As long as that's how the product was described or agreed when I bought it, then I think that's moral.
Kindles aren't sold with the feature of being able to remove the SIM and use it separately. If that's what you want... buy a different product.