Thought I was done writing about the Kindle, but this takes the cake
I pretty much started ignoring information about the Kindle. I don’t like the policies, the equipment doesn’t seem to quite be there yet, and it is still on the expensive side. I just kind of put it out of mind. Until I happened to read David Pogue’s article in the NY Times this morning. Turns out all sales on the Kindle aren’t final. Even after you buy something, Amazon can change its mind and just delete it from your Kindle. This is what happened to buyers of 1984 and Animal Farm. The publisher changed its mind about selling electronic versions of Orwell’s books so Amazon, without warning, snuck onto people’s Kindles and deleted the books. Sure, I imagine they provided a refund. The money isn’t really the point here, it just re-emphasizes the danger of electronic posessions. You rarely actually own anything from “the cloud”. You are just borrowing it indefinitely. All your rights can be changed after the fact, turns out that even includes your right to possess it at all.
I love technology, that’s the whole point of my blog, I just love the new and the cutting edge and I like to write about it – I hate that cloud computing can’t develop to its real potential because you can’t trust the safety of your information and you can’t make informaed consumer decisions when your rights can be revoked retroactively.
Thanks to David Pogue for bringing this to everyone’s attention.