Is Barnes & Noble violating my privacy or my copyright?

[elfs]

So, I'm in the middle of writing a supposed action/adventure SF lesbian romance mash-up thing with a couple of fairly good love scenes and one really nice "coming out" scene that makes me happy. Since I have real trouble with typos, I side-loaded the current WIP onto my Nooks (yes, I own two of them, a pocket-sized one for my phone and a full-sized Nook Color) and started noting down different things about the story. It's got a great beginning, a muddle, and a terrible ending. I had an idea about the ending, but it'll take some work. I was using the Nook Color last night. This morning, I had an errand to run and while waiting in line pulled out my phone to contine. What it gave me was this: "You are on page 1, but on your other Nook you were last on page 39. Do you want to go to page 39? Yes/No."

I felt genuinely creeped out that this information was rolling around the Internet like that. If I'd owned the mechanism of synchronization, I'd probably be comfortable with it, but I don't: Barnes & Noble does. Now, B&N has generally been pretty good, but given that 95% of the books I have on my Nook are side-loaded stuff that are either ripped copies of MS-LIT books (legitimately purchased, but still, I had to crack them to get them onto my Palm, and now my Nook), Calibre-encoded stuff downloaded from my old hangouts at alt.sex.stories and the like, or grey-market yuri manga, I feel a little uncomfortable with anyone tracking what I read like that.

More to the point, does this mean that a pre-release copy of Honest Impulses is rolling around on a Barnes & Noble server? Are they illegitimately copying and tracking everything I've got on my Nook, not just the downloaded stuff but the sideloaded stuff as well?

I asked a B&N representative about that and he assured me, no, they don't. When I asked what information the Nook does send to B&N about my reading habits, he couldn't tell me. Which makes me wonder even more.

Comments

[mouser.livejournal.com]

More to the point, does this mean that a pre-release copy of Honest Impulses is rolling around on a Barnes & Noble server?
Obviously, yes - it sync'd.

Are they illegitimately copying and tracking everything I've got on my Nook, not just the downloaded stuff but the sideloaded stuff as well?
I doubt it's illegitimately - it's probably in their EULA. As for the rest... Probably. Almost certainly.

Yea, welcome to the 21st century. It's not Big Brother watching us (although he's out there) it's Big Bucks, hoping to get another dollar in sales.

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

Of course they *have* your information: you gave it to them, and complaining about that is absurd. The question is whether they're doing with it what you want them to do, what they said they would do, or something else entirely.

[stellatangdele.livejournal.com]

I suppose you could sue them for $10,000 under the Digital Milennium Copyright Act for each instance of their copying the document you are writing, and then do discovery to find out if they have a pre-release copy of Honest Impulses running around on their server. But if you lost, then you'd probably have to end up paying their lawyers' fees and court costs. It might be cheaper and less of a hassle to write on something other than a nook.

[pakraticus.livejournal.com]

Oh well, there's an item removed from my budget.
For the nook simple touch I'd want a clarification as to 1(g) from http://www.barnesandnoble.com/u/Terms-of-Service-NOOK-Simple-Touch/379003279/
1(a) and 1(f) indicates that they don't put side loaded material on their servers (They probably don't want to get sued for deduping ripped off amazon content)

1(d) looks to be grounds to setup reverse https proxies on your home network to see what they send back to B&N.

From their privacy policy.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/help/cds2.asp?PID=25560#q1

Information collected from Barnes & Noble Devices includes information about sideloaded content. No clue which information tho'.

Oh well... I guess the time has come to setup the default deny firewall on the home network.

And if anyone can recommend an ebook reader WITHOUT wireless... I'd appreciate it.

[shaterri.livejournal.com]

Jeez, Elf — to be blunt: you're a software engineer, think like one. If you were building their system, and you had to construct the behavior you've just described, how would you do it? My first guess would be that they keep a db of book-and-page, and that when you flip a page the info about what page you're on is sync'd up to their server. For books on their store the key is presumably the backend ID; for sideloaded works where they don't have an ID it's probably something like title or title-and-author, though filename is another reasonable possibility. Why would they waste bandwidth and disk space on transferring some sideloaded behemoth onto their servers? They certainly know what the filenames on your device are (and probably whatever the book equivalent of an ID3 tag is), but I honestly don't see the business case for taking more than that unless they're trying to be actively evil.

[tcepsa.livejournal.com]

I'm not familiar with the details of how the Nook works, but could you try something like this to see whether they put a copy of side-loaded material to their servers?

1. Create a test document
2. Turn off your phone*
3. Side-load it onto your Nook
4. Turn off the Nook (potentially after syncing if there's a manual sync feature)
5. Turn on your phone
6. Fire up your Nook app on your phone
7. Sync your account and see whether it shows up in your list of available works
8. If it does, see whether it successfully loads when you open it

If so, that would strongly suggest to me that they did pull a copy of it from the Nook. I don't see any other way that it could have gotten from point A to point B since they were never on at the same time at any point after the document had been loaded onto the Nook; therefore it would seem that there must have been an intermediary element.


*To avoid it automatically pushing onto your phone through a potentially P2P mechanism, which would defeat the purpose of the exercise.

[EDIT: Removed extra space from list]

[ewhac.livejournal.com]

It may be some prelude to a cloud-based thing -- install once, read everywhere -- which would be cool, if I owned the servers as well.

Get thee to http://cyanogenmod.com/ . Replace B&N's firmware with CM 7.1 (CM 7.2 is available in pre-release form, if you're feeling adventurous). Then install the ebook reader of your choice from Android Ma... excuse me, Google Play. You'll end up with a surprisingly capable general purpose Android tablet.