For thousands of users, a book they thought they had properly purchased suddenly disappeared. This, unsurprisingly, caused considerable grief and consternation, arguing that “it‘s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.”

As reasonable as this user reaction sounds, a perusal of the Kindle’s terms of service reveals that users aren’t actually buying a book, but merely a license to utilize digital content on their device. While the TOS doesn’t directly state the license is revocable, it does indicate that the license is conditional on Amazon’s authorization, likely giving them the legal authority to remove books from a Kindle whenever they de-authorize its use.

So, yes, while it feels as if Barnes & Noble broke into your house to take back the book you purchased last week, the reality of licensing digital content is different than with brick and mortar. Clearly, we all need to do a better job educating consumers about content licenses, DRMs, and the nature of our digital tools.

But there is a much larger issue here that is being overlooked by many commentators: how simple it is for Amazon to simply take back what they sold you.

More than just an eBook reader, the Kindle is Amazon’s latest cog in its large-scale infrastructure of intellectual surveillance. Moving beyond its (now famous) ability to track one’s book purchases, wish lists, and clickstream activities on Amazon.com, Kindle gives Amazon the power to monitor and collect what you actually do with the books you buy license.

Ted Striphas describes this well in his discussion on “Kindle & the Labor of Reading” (emphasis added):

Much has been made about Kindle’s downstream capabilities—the fact that you can acquire the complete contents of any Kindle-formatted book in under a minute, provided you’re within range of a cell tower. But what about the data it transmits upstream, back to Amazon.com? The Kindle license agreement and terms of use are instructive in this regard. In the subsection entitled “Information Received,” the agreement states: “The Device Software will provide Amazon with data about your Device and its interaction with the Service (such as available memory, up-time, log files and signal strength) and information related to content on your Device and your use of it (such as automatic bookmarking of the last page read and content deletions from the Device).” Here’s the especially intriguing part: “Annotations, bookmarks, notes, highlights, or similar markings you make on your Device are backed up through the service and subject to the Amazon.com privacy notice.” And there, it’s worth mentioning, all of the data you generate while reading on your Kindle falls within the purview of “the information we [Amazon.com] collect and analyze” for marketing and related purposes.

This “snoop-friendly” nature of the Kindle is what made it effortless for Amazon to be able to reach in and take back Orwell’s words. The fact that Kindles users went to bed reading Orwell, and woke up the next morning with it suddenly stripped from their Kindles’ memory should be reminder to us all of the power Amazon maintains over readers. The ability to read freely and anonymously continues to be eroded before our (digital) eyes.

UPDATE: Please also read Jack Balkin’s post, where he comes to similar conclusions:

For centuries, we have understood, or rather believed, that owning books came with certain rights, including the right to keep what we purchase and to use it, mark it up, and sell it in any way we like. We were free to purchase books and keep them in our homes, without telling anybody what we were reading, or indeed, what page we had last looked at. Amazon’s Kindle system upends all of these expectations. Amazon knows what books you have on your Kindle, and, in theory, it can even know the book you are currently reading, and even the last page you’ve read on each of the books you own. It can delete books, add books, or modify books, all without your permission. It can change features of the Kindle at will. In upending our assumptions about our freedoms to read books in private and use them as we see fit, Amazon threatens many of the basic freedoms to read we have come to expect in a physical world. If we want to preserve these freedoms, we will have to reform copyright law and privacy law to control the new intermediaries who can control us at a distance.

Federal prosecutors have withdrawn a subpoena seeking the identities of thousands of people who bought used books through online retailer Amazon.com Inc., newly unsealed court records show.

The withdrawal came after a judge ruled the customers have a First Amendment right to keep their reading habits from the government.

“The (subpoena’s) chilling effect on expressive e-commerce would frost keyboards across America,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker wrote in a June ruling.

“Well-founded or not, rumors of an Orwellian federal criminal investigation into the reading habits of Amazon’s customers could frighten countless potential customers into canceling planned online book purchases,” the judge wrote in a ruling he unsealed last week.

…Crocker…said he believed prosecutors were seeking the information for a legitimate purpose. But he said First Amendment concerns were justified and outweighed the subpoena’s law enforcement purpose.

“The subpoena is troubling because it permits the government to peek into the reading habits of specific individuals without their knowledge or permission,” Crocker wrote. “It is an unsettling and un-American scenario to envision federal agents nosing through the reading lists of law-abiding citizens while hunting for evidence against somebody else.”

The government later found the customer data they needed for their case by examining the defendants own computer system seized by the authorities. So, instead of just doing some legwork of their own to find the data, the government saw it easier to just ask Amazon to turn over customer records, and potentially set a dangerous precedent in the process. Unbelievable.

A few months ago I started musing about the key differences in privacy perspectives/practices between common access points to (book) knowledge: libraries, bookstores, and Google Book Search. Its nice to see Amazon acting like a library in this case: protecting patrons right to access knowledge anonymously and without undue oversight by government.

I give Amazon further credit for pushing to have the court documents unsealed to make this federal subpoena public. Good PR for them, and a reminder to us all of the importance of ensuring free and unfettered access to knowledge.

Amazon.com is developing a system to gather and keep massive amounts of intimate information about its millions of shoppers, including their religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity and income.

The database, which would combine information disclosed voluntarily by customers with facts gleaned from public databases, conceivably would give Amazon a larger or more detailed profile of its customers than any other retailer.
…Such a database would include the gender, date of birth, interests, occupation, education, income level, residence, race and ethnicity of customers for Amazon’s “gift clustering” program.

Customers already willingly disclose some personal information on the site — to create a “wish list” of desired products, for example. The larger potential database would go beyond that.

“Even if a customer does not know demographic information or interests of a possible recipient, the system may be able to access such information from a user profile for the recipient, from past ordering patterns of the recipient, or from publicly accessible databases,” the patent application said.

According to the Register, this patent application is the latest in a long line of database mining techniques filed by Amazon. But in the aftermath of AOL’s release of search queries from over half a million users, such a database should send up a red flag for those who (only now) recognize the extent to which their online shopping and intellectual activities are being surveilled and aggregated.

[via Privacy Digest]