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Comment by _puk | Hacker News Reader

Whilst I agree with the sentiment, it does occur to me just how many kindles I see with ads.

Is there any data released on ads Vs no ads versions?

That's the closest comparator I can think of.

I've never had a non-eInk Kindle, so maybe it is different for them, but I've had eInk Kindles both with and without ads. My first was without ads. Since you can add the "without ads" option to a "with ads" Kindle later by paying the difference, I bought my second with ads to see how bad it was.

Here are the only differences I've noticed:

• With ads, the sleep screen displays some artwork from a book Amazon is selling [1] and some text suggesting you come to the store and buy books,

• The home screen has an ad at the bottom.

Since when I'm not using the Kindle the sleep screen is hidden behind the cover, and when I am using it I'm somewhere other than the home screen 99.9% of the time, I never saw any reason to add the "without ads" option, and when it was time to replace that Kindle I again went with ads.

I suspect that the vast majority of people that buy the "no ads" option up front do so because when they see "with ads" they are envisioning a web-like experience where the ads are all over the place and intrusive and animated and distracting.

[1] Usually a romance novel for me, even though I've never bought any romance novels from Amazon, nor anything even remotely like a romance novel. In fact, I don't think any book I've bought from them even had any romantic relations between any of its characters.

Heh. With ads, this was always one of the ways I could embarrass my Bride. You are reading '50 Shades of Grey' or whatever trashy novel shows up on the cover of her gadget. Always makes her blush.

On the eink kindle, I paid for ad removal just in general principles. I probably could have lived with the lock screen ads, but the home screen ad was unacceptable. Vast majority of my book purchases over the past ten years have been ebooks. I’ve gone a bit sentimental in thinking of the book list as my library. And I didn’t want a billboard of any sort in my library. Real or virtual. Have a feeling there are at least dozens of us who are that allergic to ads.

I have also purchased a Fire during a Black Friday sale. Got rid of the ads on that one too, but for free since some nice person over at xda made an automated process for that. On a side note, with Termux it isn’t entirely horrible as a 7 inch laptop when paired with a hinged keyboard case. A portable system at a similar price to a Pi.

> Whilst I agree with the sentiment, it does occur to me just how many kindles I see with ads.

> Is there any data released on ads Vs no ads versions?

Do they offer a tracking vs no tracking option too? The absence of adverts does not mean the absence of tracking.

For the non-tablet Kindle, I'm not sure if the differentiation between tracking and ads makes a lot of sense. You (well, I at least) already use Amazon to buy the books that are on my Kindle. I guess they could track how fast I read them. But that seems trivial compared to already knowing what I'm reading.

The tracking is somewhat inherent to the software — syncing what page you've read up to in a book between devices (a feature many people find crucial!), cannot really be divorced from having the raw data to create server-side metrics about people's reading habits.

Even if you E2E-encrypt each user's data for cloud storage and have devices join a P2P-keybag, ala iMessage, consider the ad-tech department of your same company as if they were an external adversary for a moment. What would an external adversary do in that situation? Traffic analysis of updates to the cloud-side E2E-encrypted bundle. That alone would still be enough to create a useful advertising profile of the customer's reading habits, since your app is single-purpose — the only reason for that encrypted bundle to be updated, is if the user is flipping pages!

And, together with the fact that your ad-tech department also knows what books the customer is reading (because your device can only be used to read books you sell, and thus books you have transaction records for selling them), this department can probably guess what the user is reading anyway. No matter how much your hardware-product department tries to hide it.

ofcourse it can be divorced, keep the data client-side, as kindle does?

> syncing what page you've read up to in a book (a feature many people find crucial!), cannot really be divorced from having the raw data to create server-side metrics about people's reading habits.

Sure it can. You encrypt the data so the client can read it and the server can't. When you add a new device, you e.g. scan a QR code on your old device so that it can add the decryption key to the new device, and the server never knows what it is.

That scenario is addressed in the next few paragraphs.

The next few paragraphs were not originally in the post. And you obviously get less information from knowing the user has updated some encrypted data than having the specific page of the specific book. It is also not inherently necessary for the server to have even that information; it could be sent directly from one device to the other(s) or via an independent third party relay (e.g. Tor).

This. Distributed consensus is easy and cheap to implement when all participants can be trusted (as opposed to the Byzantine problem that I.e. blockchain tries to solve). It’s even easier if you’re ok with approximately eventual consistency with a reasonably high probability of convergence. Page state seems like it fits into this category

My position on data privacy is slightly different from other people on this site—unlike some, I don’t care all that much if Amazon knows my reading habits, but I do not want it to show ads, provide recommendations, or otherwise tailor my experience based on what it knows. I’m concerned that this “tailoring” puts me in a filter bubble, and locks me in to a narrow set of preferences for the rest of my life.

In this regard, Amazon is among the worst of the big tech companies that I interact with. Google lets me turn off personalization—when I go to Youtube, I see an extremely generic set of recommended videos. But I can’t do it on Amazon.

(I don’t use Facebook, not sure what can be switched off.)

> Whilst I agree with the sentiment, it does occur to me just how many kindles I see with ads.

True, although the price difference for the Kindle is about 20%. If the discount on a Macbook Air was similar, I'm sure it would be well subscribed.

The discount for what? There are no ads on the Mac.

> If the option was a mac with privacy vs a mac without privacy but $10 cheaper

OP was comparing the Kindle with ads discount to an imaginary Mac without privacy discount.

It sounds like one of the weirder "freedom" arguments. Who is going to pay extra for a Mac without key security features?

They sold a lot of the ad enabled tablets one black friday for like $80 which seemed like a good deal at the time despite not running google apps which most people desire, having ads on the lock screen, and having the worlds shittiest home screen app for android. I bought one for my wife. If you are lazy or not inclined you can actually pay after the fact to remove ads.

Alternatively you can deliberately break the ad functionality, install google apps, and android lets you change your home screen.

1 and 2 worked but they broke the ability to set your own home so the fix is a hacky app to hijack the home button to show the right home of your choosing. This worked for over a year then they repeatedly blacklisted such apps, then it worked but with a 2 second delay which is basically horrible and extensions started crashing the gmail app.

Worst piece of shit ever.

> having the worlds shittiest home screen app for android...Worst piece of shit ever.

> I bought one for my wife.

Aww, that's so sweet! ;)

Prior experience had led me to believe that crappy default experience was relatively common in Android but easy to rectify.

Mea culpa but her replacement is so nice I got one too. Moto g7 powers.

I bought a kindle. It didn't have ads. I did a factory reset. Now it does. This is the first time I've heard about a choice.

I wish i could pay for no ads on everything. If there are only like three ad networks for 99 percent of the internet, and they can track me easily, and they know how much I'm worth to them, can't they just email me every month and say, "if you want a no-Doubleclick ad experience next month, it will cost you $4.65, click here to pay." Not like they aren't already doing the tracking, and this would increase the value to their ad customers since they wouldn't pay for views from people who don't want to see ads.

I think its worthwhile trying to test the hypothesys, but i dont think anyone takes privacy on a book reader with the same passion as they do on a mobile phone.

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