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

[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]