Kindle Fire

Posted by: Am_Fear_Liath_Mor

Kindle Fire - 09/28/11 04:15 PM

Kindle Fire is another tablet based computer building on the success of the original Kindle ebook reader. It is priced very competitively at $199.

Of interest is the Amazon Silk browser which uses a revolutionary 'Cloud accelerated' Amazon Web Services AWS server (essentially a web proxy server), which will record your browsing history and no doubt will sell this information on.

Would you give up your privacy in the surveillance web architecture that is constantly being implemented i.e such as social networking companies such as Facebook (a company having links from In-q-tel - a CIA venture capital Fund) that also wants to record your browsing history as well, for a cheap tablet computer? (which probably costs more to manufacture than they are selling it for)
Posted by: Mark_R

Re: Kindle Fire - 09/28/11 06:30 PM

Originally Posted By: Am_Fear_Liath_Mor
...Of interest is the Amazon Silk browser which uses a revolutionary 'Cloud accelerated' Amazon Web Services AWS server (essentially a web proxy server), which will record your browsing history and no doubt will sell this information on.

Would you give up your privacy in the surveillance web architecture that is constantly being implemented i.e such as social networking companies such as Facebook (a company having links from In-q-tel - a CIA venture capital Fund) that also wants to record your browsing history as well, for a cheap tablet computer? (which probably costs more to manufacture than they are selling it for)


Too late. If your own a phone, a cell phone, a library card, credit card, bank account, access the internet, went to school, or use any other service that requires somebody else to provide the service, then your information has being recorded. Short of going completely off the grid, you're going to leave a data trail. Accept it and take the appropriate measures. Like, not to leave any "exploitable" data (real name, address, ss#, etc.) in public forums.

The fact is that the information is being sold mainly to marketing and data collection agencies like ChoicePoint. I don't think NSA or Homeland Security really cares about your choice of bottled water, storage, or flashlights for the next disaster.

EDIT: You do turn off your cookies when browsing. Right?
Posted by: MartinFocazio

Re: Kindle Fire - 09/28/11 06:35 PM

Originally Posted By: Am_Fear_Liath_Mor

Would you give up your privacy in the surveillance web architecture that is constantly being implemented i.e such as social networking companies such as Facebook (a company having links from In-q-tel - a CIA venture capital Fund) that also wants to record your browsing history as well, for a cheap tablet computer? (which probably costs more to manufacture than they are selling it for)


Ummm...
How many times do I have to say it?

The opposite of private is "Digital"

If you don't want companies tracking you, live in a tent, pay cash and ride a bike.

Dare I go on about why I use my real name here on this and other forums? Dare I suggest that most of us (perhaps all of us) are far too boring to attract specific attention and far to valuable as consumers to not have automated profiles created by advertising servers.

All of your phone calls are tracked.
All of your credit card transactions are tracked.
Every TV show you watch is tracked.
The radio station you liesten to in the car is tracked by devices you don't even know are there.
Your shopping habits are tracked. Your shopping BEHAVIOR (how you walk, where you walk, where you stop) is tracked.
Your birth records, your school records, your job records, your credit profile, your driving profile, your health records, your prescriptions, your relationships with others - all tracked when you "opt in" by using, accessing, participating in this modern life.

If you want out, if you want "privacy" you need to leave industrialized society.
Posted by: MartinFocazio

Re: Kindle Fire - 09/28/11 06:38 PM

Originally Posted By: Mark_R

EDIT: You do turn off your cookies when browsing. Right?


Does not matter. Cookies are passe. Flash databases and super cookies and browser fingerprints are more reliable. You can delete all the cookies you want. I can spend $0.20 and target ads to YOU on any of 1,000,000 web sites.
Posted by: Eugene

Re: Kindle Fire - 09/28/11 06:59 PM

I use Ghostery to block a lot of the tracking stuff.
Posted by: Jeanette_Isabelle

Re: Kindle Fire - 09/28/11 08:27 PM

Originally Posted By: MartinFocazio
Your shopping habits are tracked. Your shopping BEHAVIOR (how you walk, where you walk, where you stop) is tracked.

When you pay with cash, how are your shopping habits tracked?

Jeanette Isabelle
Posted by: Am_Fear_Liath_Mor

Re: Kindle Fire - 09/28/11 09:18 PM

Quote:
Does not matter. Cookies are passe. Flash databases and super cookies and browser fingerprints are more reliable. You can delete all the cookies you want. I can spend $0.20 and target ads to YOU on any of 1,000,000 web sites.


You can disable flash databases, super cookies and modify your installed plugins quite easily to change browser fingerprints etc. I can even kill my own IP session to get a new IP if I wanted so that $0.20 would be a poor investment.

The Silk browser on the Amazon Kindle Fire seems to be a browser specifically designed as a data mining tool with consequences for privacy, just as you would never use a Web proxy server to send/receive sensitive data.

Interestingly the Kindle Fire doesn't appear to be available yet in the UK, perhaps because of personal data privacy laws that are in place.

Quote:
Your birth records, your school records, your job records, your credit profile, your driving profile, your health records, your prescriptions, your relationships with others - all tracked when you "opt in" by using, accessing, participating in this modern life.


The Data Protection Act of 1998 would make linking/sharing those databases illegal, but that doesn't mean to say that the UK Government hasn't attempted to do so. The main issue though is that of incompetence as most businesses and organisations in the UK barely have workable databases that are interlinked efficiently even within their own organisations. Thank goodness for incompetent Seibel programmers and UK government computer systems having a absolutely terrible record of efficient implementation. wink

Anyway why the need for the megalomaniac control freak operations collecting/selling and abusing personal information of its users and customers of these corporations.
Posted by: Am_Fear_Liath_Mor

Re: Kindle Fire - 09/28/11 09:34 PM


Quote:
I don't think NSA or Homeland Security really cares about your choice of bottled water, storage, or flashlights for the next disaster.


Why the huge and vast scale of the technological effort then? There are vast billions USD spent on computer systems every year tracking everyone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljGH07Unfe8
Posted by: Jeanette_Isabelle

Re: Kindle Fire - 09/28/11 10:10 PM

Originally Posted By: NightHiker
On a more NSA-type level:
IF an angency really wanted to know who paid cash for cetrain items (or if they're watching a specific individual) they can compare the stores transaction data and review video imagery from specific registers to get a picture of the person who paid cash. There's also your cell phone & WiFi connectivity data that can be used to determine if your phone was in a certain location at any given time.

There are prepaid cell phones.

To avoid suspicion, one would need to leave a deliberate paper trail. Just use cash for goods and certain services you don't want traced back to you.

Earlier I did research on money laundering. It's not difficult but one must be a meticulous bookkeeper.

Jeanette Isabelle
Posted by: MartinFocazio

Re: Kindle Fire - 10/03/11 11:45 PM

Originally Posted By: JeanetteIsabelle
To avoid suspicion, one would need to leave a deliberate paper trail. Just use cash for goods and certain services you don't want traced back to you.

Earlier I did research on money laundering. It's not difficult but one must be a meticulous bookkeeper.

Jeanette Isabelle


I'll put this gently. If you just don't like advertising, and you don't want to be a part of the marketing driven culture, sure, you can reduce your exposure to tracking with prepaid phones and prepaid visa cards. However, I really can't make it more plain that if you are up to no good, cash and prepaid lifestyles will only make it a teeny bit harder to physically locate you.

Let me give you a little scenario, based on some of the work I've done with marketing tools.

Using in-store video cameras connected to facial recognition software, you can immediately tell with high confidence that the person coming into a drug store is a repeat customer (yes, just like in "minority report") or a first time customer. You can track their path as they walk and factor in things such as the speed they walkthe aisles they pick and the places they pause. You can tell if a woman is menstruating with 75% accuracy. You can tell if someone is married with 80% accuracy. If they get a prescription data about that is sent to a company called IMS Health. Transaction data (what you bought, how you paid) goes to various companies. If you parked ia parking lot, your car radio may have been scanned remotely to determine what station you were listening to before you came in and after you leave.
Thats if you pay cash.
If you pay with a credit or debit card, of course, there's much more.

My point is this: in reality, nobody actually cares about who you are and what you do, except when it comes to selling you stuff. You are a "consumer" a "market segment" a "target" and that fact that you have a name and an address is pretty much irrelevant unless they are addressing an envelope to you.

My further point is that the advertisers and marketers have very good tools, and in many ways these tools are better than the government tools used for monitoring large populations. However, the government, when needed, can use similar tools to zero in on one or more people - but it's very hard. It's much easier to use all that personal information to sell shampoo or to change the advertising you see on a web page than it is to specifically track YOU.
Posted by: Blast

Re: Kindle Fire - 10/04/11 01:03 AM

Quote:
You can track their path as they walk and factor in things such as the speed they walkthe aisles they pick and the places they pause. You can tell if a woman is menstruating with 75% accuracy.


Wow, am I going to have fun with this!! grin grin grin
-Blast
Posted by: ireckon

Re: Kindle Fire - 10/04/11 04:32 AM

I agree with Martin. Companies like Yahoo! and Google know more about you than you may think is possible. They have so much tracking data that they need internal policies to hold them back from being evil.

Here's an excerpt from a job posting at Google:
Quote:
We take pride in working for a company with a clear mission ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful") and a real soul ("don't be evil").


That's verbatim from the job posting. Google actually has "don't be evil" in their mission statement. In other words, they have the ability to be evil because they have so much data, but Google has deemed it necessary to make a policy of not being evil. I hope all Google employees, who have access to valuable information, feel the same way.
Posted by: Phaedrus

Re: Kindle Fire - 10/04/11 06:18 AM

All the paranoia aside I think the device itself looks very good. I'll be watching for reviews.
Posted by: MarkO

Re: Kindle Fire - 10/11/11 08:15 PM

Tangential to some of the comments above.

What do you folks think ??

http://blogs.reuters.com/reuters-money/2...ck-gains-steam/