As the Internet Archive appeals a court decision blocking alternatives
to surveillance-ridden digital book licenses, a new report reveals that
the world’s largest publisher may be selling readers’ intimate personal
data to the highest bidder
<https://www.fastcompany.com/90996547/e-books-are-fast-becoming-tools-of-corporate-surveillance>
Three in ten
<https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/01/06/three-in-ten-americans-now-read-e-books/>
Americans read digital books. Whether they’re accessing online textbooks
or checking out the latest bestselling e-book from the public library,
the majority of these readers are subject to both the greed of Big
Publishing and the priorities of Big Tech. In fact, Amazon’s Kindle held
72%
<https://wordsrated.com/amazon-kindle-e-book-and-kindle-unlimited-statistics/>
of the e-reader market in 2022. And if there’s one thing we know about
Big Tech companies like Amazon
<https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-empire-of-surveillance-leveraging-monopoly-power-tracking-purchases-2022-8>,
their real product isn’t the book. It’s the user data.
Major publishers are giving Big Tech free rein to watch what you read
and where, including books on sensitive topics, like if you check out a
book on self care after an abortion. Worse, tech and publishing
corporations are gobbling up data beyond your reading habits—today,
there are no federal laws to stop them from surveilling people who read
digital books across the entire internet.
Reader surveillance is a deeply intersectional threat, according to a
congressional letter
<https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2023-12-07-25-human-rights-organizations-call-on-2024-congress-to-investigate-big-tech-and-publishings-stranglehold-over-digital-books>
issued last week from a coalition of groups whose interests span civil
rights, anti-surveillance, anti-book ban, racial justice, reproductive
justice, LGBTQ+, immigrant, and antimonopoly. Our letter calls on
federal lawmakers to investigate the harms of tech and publishing
corporations’ powerful hold over digital book access.
This investigation is an essential first step to revive the right to
read without fear of having your interests used against you. Because
unfortunately, that right is on life support when it comes to digital
books.
Right now, there’s a concerted effort from anti-abortion lawmakers and
vigilantes to discover who is getting or supporting an abortion, and
data brokers have already been sued
<https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/08/ftc-sues-kochava-selling-data-tracks-people-reproductive-health-clinics-places-worship-other>
for packaging up data on visitors to reproductive health centers. But
the U.S. still has no meaningful federal data privacy
<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/digital-privacy-legislation-civil-rights-legislation>
protections to turn off the tap of intimate personal data.
Whether you’re traveling for abortion care, legally accessing it at home
<https://www.plancpills.org/>, experiencing a miscarriage
<https://www.npr.org/2022/07/03/1109015302/abortion-prosecuting-pregnancy-loss>,
or finding support resources <https://mahotline.org/> for a loved one,
worrying that reading a book might betray private medical information
should be absurd. Yet in today’s post-Roe landscape of legal, social,
and health threats around pregnancy, we need to be concerned that Big
Publishing’s new hunger for reader data might put abortion seekers at
risk of
<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/digital-privacy-legislation-civil-rights-legislation>
criminalization and violence
<https://www.insider.com/texas-woman-killed-boyfriend-getting-abortion-2023-5>.
Such /1984/-esque threats woven into the lives of everyday people are
particularly insidious. The average abortion seeker does not know
<https://jezebel.com/nebraska-mom-pleads-guilty-to-giving-abortion-pills-to-1850621217>
how to navigate safely in a surveillance state—and knowing that they may
be surveilled causes people to not access
<https://societyfp.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/WeCount-Release-June-2023.pdf>
the reproductive or abortion care they need, to not seek the mental and
emotional support they require, and to delay care until further into an
unwanted pregnancy. All of these choices endanger a pregnant person.
In the age of artificial intelligence, the ability to analyze
unfathomably detailed data on individual people, create reports and
inferences about those people, and use the whole lot of it to train AI
models is constantly improving. The incentives to exploit the data of
readers are the strongest they have ever been.
Big Publishing is clearly seeing nothing but dollar signs
<https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/an-app-called-libby-and-the-surprisingly-big-business-of-library-e-books>
as apps like Hoopla
<https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hoopla-digital/id580643740> gobble up
identity-linked data on readers—and so it would be natural to put our
hope in public libraries, which view patron privacy as a fundamental
right essential to a functioning democracy. In the human rights
community, libraries’ resistance against government surveillance
<https://slate.com/technology/2015/06/usa-freedom-act-before-snowden-librarians-were-the-anti-surveillance-heroes.html>
under the Patriot Act is legendary.
Unfortunately, Big Publishing has sued to stop libraries from loaning
surveillance-free digital books—winning a lower court judgment that the
nonprofit Internet Archive <https://www.battleforlibraries.com/> is set
to appeal before the year is out. Unless that judgment is overturned or
new laws are passed, libraries have no alternative but to license
digital books that are likely to be riddled with spyware.
We know less about surveillance at public libraries because, as a
November report
<https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-knowledge-base/confidentiality-clauses-and-ndas/>
from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition details,
Big Publishing has been increasingly sneaky about privacy and
surveillance in their library contracts. This is a play right out of
Silicon Valley’s handbook: to hide bad behavior with unaccountable
external links or NDAs
<https://fortune.com/2019/04/29/silicon-valley-nda/> that prohibit
libraries from warning their patrons.
Without laws to stop them, it’s reasonable to expect that popular
library apps like Hoopla and Libby are hiding similar behavior behind
legal smokescreens. Already, the absurdity of Amazon Kindle’s data
collection is well documented
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/03/amazon-kindle-data-reading-tracking-privacy>
and a source of Amazon’s overarching monopsony power
<https://jacobin.com/2022/11/cory-doctorow-chokepoint-capitalism-monopoly-tech>
in the book market.
With libraries facing legal annihilation
<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/publishers-librarians-ebooks-hachette-v-internet-archive/673560/>
from every direction
<https://www.tiktok.com/@fightfortheftr/video/7267303386683297067> if
they attempt to carve out surveillance-free spaces for digital books,
the future of reading is in the eleventh hour. Lawmakers must
immediately launch an investigation to protect not only abortion
patients, but all readers throughout this country.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/Lia Holland is a fiction author and campaigns and communications
director at digital rights organization Fight for the Future, where they
focus on creator’s rights and emerging technologies./ /Jade Pfaefflin
Bounds is a reproductive and racial justice educator, doula, and digital
rights organizer with Fight for the Future. His work converges and
orients towards collective liberation./
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/Correction: An earlier version of this op-ed claimed the publisher
Elsevier was tracking and selling data to third parties, a claim
Elsevier rejects. Such claims have since been removed from the
/article/. In a statement, a spokesperson says: “We take the issue of
data privacy and security very seriously and maintaining the trust of
the people who use our services is critically important to us. Our data
privacy practices are transparent, comply with the law and operate
within a clear ethical framework. We support the right of individuals to
know and manage how their personal information is collected and used, as
articulated in our Privacy Principles and Privacy Policy and
demonstrated by our user-facing Privacy Center and cookie management
platforms.”/
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