The article talks about surveillance by the companies, and how they track you visiting web pages. All known stuff.
But the big hint here is surveillance within ebooks. And there is no hint about how this might be done.
I have edited literally thousands of ebooks from many sources. I've found traces of java script in one or two, and in neither case were the scripts anything that could track you. And most ebook formats and readers don't support scripts anyway.
Reading online, sure, they have you in focus. But reading an ebook offline? I've seen no evidence of it. Neither have many thousands of users on the relevant Reddit or Mobilread platforms.
Not that they would not like to do this! But I don't think they are there yet.
If anybody has seen a mechanism, like an example of code in the ebook, I'd love to see it.
@demerara@dbsalk@scissortail The problems with surveilling electronic resource use - including ebooks and audiobooks - are there when you are dealing with files that can only be accessed via a particular program or service.
Yes, you are correct. These things you can't read offline. And most of the time, going the visual route (like imaging each screen and then OCR) to get a clear-text copy is ruinously time consuming and difficult.
Only if you can put the file on a device, and then read off-line, in airplane mode for example, with a FOSS reader, are you reasonably safe from tracking.
Even if you get a book DRM-free from Gutenberg or a shadow library, if you read it using a corporate reader like the Amazon app on a smartphone...I'd bet that Big Brother is watching.
@demerara@yo_bj@scissortail I keep coming back to this quote from the #book "100 Things We've Lost to the Internet" by Pamela Paul: "The United States remains the sole developed country without some kind of federal consumer #data protection law or agency."