Privacy Issues Surrounding Tablet Devices

Case Study #1: e-Readers

Increasingly, Kindles and other e-readers have become a significant presence in the reading market. The various potential benefits of e-readers are discussed elsewhere on the site, including making information and books more available to consumers wherever they are. But the ability to receive information on e-readers is coupled with the ability to transmit it — often information one wouldn’t expect, or necessarily want, anyone else to be able to know.

A recent report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that Amazon Kindles and Google Books record data about what books one reads, how long one spends on each page, which pages one reads, the annotations one makes in the e-book, as well as all search and purchase information associated with IP address. Nor does a user have the ability to remove the information that is stored about itself, except in some cases by deleting an e-book that it has bought.

Traditionally reading is a very private endeavour, and the ability of companies to observe one’s exact reading habits may leave some people feeling uncomfortable. People may want to hide their guilty pleasures, or they may be reading politically controversial material. Either way they have arguably a right to do this without being watched. E-readers have made information more accessible to us, but they have made more information about us accessible as well.

Case Study #2: iPad

iPads have been recently criticized, as have certain e-reader devices and iPhones, for their tracking capabilities, which know where the user was located at any time. The iPads and iPhones in particular were recently revealed to write the location of users to a hidden file on the device, that Apple says is never transmitted to the company’s servers. Due to the proprietary nature of the systems on the iPads and iPhones, it is not possible to prevent the devices from recording this information.

Several ethical issues have been raised over cases of recording location information. For one thing, the data on the iPads and iPhones is not encrypted, so if the device falls into someone else’s hands, that person can easily view one’s detailed location history. Recorded location information could also be subpoenaed and used in court to prove or disprove an alibi. Apple hasn’t explained what it’s collecting the data for. Like e-readers, tablet devices that are used to access information provide private information to the distributors, calling into question the ethical nature of “information availability”.

Technologies and the Future

Technologies do exist that can give consumers privacy on tablet devices, and it is likely that more will arrive in the future. For example, privacy laws have driven the implementation of access control tools, which are useful especially in non-managed devices like iPads. In the future it may also be possible to do private searches on public databases, through cryptographic protections that will allow users to navigate the internet in absolute secrecy. Non-proprietary software, or the rise of devices that use such software, may also enable consumers to better protect themselves against companies that want to gather information about their users. Such technologies may lead to a more private, more ethical, tablet-abundant world.

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