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Amazon's basic business model is not focused on surveillance or putting all your data in the cloud or vendor lock in.

While we could debate what "basic business models" means, Amazon more than anyone wants to understand your life in hopes of selling you everything you might ever want. That is their business. They have as great a motivation to try to mine your existence than the other companies.

OK, that's a great point.

My response is that I'm not really trying to not be marketed to, I'm just trying to be not surveilled. If a company wants to market to people who are trying to avoid surveillance, I'll support them, as long as they don't surveil me to figure that out.

Amazon could do that. Google can't. Apple probably could, but they're pretty heavily invested in cloud stuff at this point. Microsoft is, well, Microsoft.

>Amazon also is in the interesting position of probably being able to disrupt literally all commercial and retail business in the next couple years

I agree, but replacing a diverse range of suppliers with a monopoly is not a positive form of disruption in my view

Right, while disruption is theoretically good for consumers, the major effect I've seen from Amazon over the past 15 years is that nearly every physical bookstore around me has closed. I would prefer a world without Amazon to a world without bookstores.

Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. I was having a discussion earlier today. It seems like a choice between the publishing cartel and Amazon. Amazon is probably better for just books, but for everything else, I'm uncomfortable with the potential monopoly.

I boycott non-free books and culture. I'm very leery of Amazon, too, but I don't have a policy for them yet.

They stem mostly from not being able to read anonymously, and from the concern of DRM and the potential issues with Amazon being able to revoke the Kindle books you purchase.

Everything else apart, while this is a reasonable concern, it is also an addressable concern.

The Amazon DRM is weak, known and can be decrypted. It take minimal research to set this up, and then circumvention is merely a click away.

This means that while Amazon some time in the future can revoke your access to purchases you've made for whatever reason (even though I doubt they will), they cannot revoke you from using the DRM-free copies you've created once you've stripped the DRM from your original purchases.

I used to be concerned about this, and then I realized: if Amazon revokes my access to the e-books/movies I legally purchased, I will just go download pirated copies. Why do that kind of backups myself when the internet is already doing it for me?

It provides a narrow legal shield if in the case you get popped by the FEDs for owning or distributing copywritten material.

"But Feds, I paid for this copy, just stripped the DRM off of it."

I'm a huge supporter of piracy but I personally prefer to boycott any non-free ebooks or movies instead.

It's easy to break the technological norms that protect books. It's a lot tougher to break the cultural ones.

I used to justify my Amazon book purchases this way, but then I realized it wasn't worth it. Removing DRM is illegal already, and so is downloading a copy for free. I don't want to support a company that uses DRM with my money, whether its easy to crack or not. Now I only buy DRM-free books, and find the rest elsewhere.

Under the DMCA, circumvention of DRM is a violation of the law. You may as well just pirate everything.

You can address this concern technologically, but can you do it culturally?

Not to mention, what happens when you forget to strip out the DRM and Amazon [revokes your books.](http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/some-e-books-are-m...)

Are you really suggesting that you strip the DRM out from every book your purchase from Amazon? (Though, feel free not to incriminate yourself on the internet while responding.)

Obviously yes. I demand to be able to own that which I buy.

Same for digital goods and digital devices/appliances. I want open formats and the ability to flash open firmware.

Lucky for me, where I live, that is not a crime.

That's why I have high hopes for FirefoxOS. It is open and not made by Amazon, Microsoft, Apple or Google.

Agreed. I may just be past smartphones altogether, but if I get one, it will only be FirefoxOS or some other alternative.