19 ms·

Your Kindle got stolen? Don't count on Amazon's help

99 points by nathell 14y ago

speeder 14y ago
This is not exactly a surprise to me, and I don't believe is purely Amazon fault, we have today in the world some very abrasive legal systems where liability is really dangerous. It is like the thief here in Brazil that broke his leg after his victim roof gave away, sued the owner of the house, and won.
- AskHugo 14y ago
  >the thief here in Brazil that broke his leg after his victim roof gave away, sued the owner of the house, and won. Source?
  - speeder 14y ago
    Failed to find it :( It is a veeeery old thing. And so simple that I found lots of more or less similar stories, but not this particular one. (but found lots of interesting stuff on google...)
    - martey 14y ago
      "And so simple that I found lots of more or less similar stories..." It is a hallmark of urban legends. This story seems to originate with the case Bodine v. Enterprise High School, which involves a 19 year old on the roof of a high school who fell through a skylight covered with tar. Your tale seems more likely to stem from the 1990s movie "Liar, Liar": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119528/quotes?qt0372695 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119528/quotes?qt0372695
  - madaxe 14y ago
    Not the same story, but very similar cases in the UK: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2074077.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2074077.stm http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2223125/90-year-old-shot-face-burglary-SUED-burglar-World-War-Two-veteran-fired-back.html#axzz2KJKEKrBz http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2223125/90-year-old-... (sorry for the daily fail link) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1356388/Villagers-outraged-police-order-protect-garden-sheds.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1356388/Villagers-ou...
    - kitbrennan 14y ago
      In none of those examples the criminal 'successfully' sued the victim (ie. won), they merely brought a frivolous case before the court.
    - stordoff 14y ago
      > http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2074077.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2074077.stm The farmer who shot him was jailed for manslaughter of the other burglar, so this isn't totally outrageous IMO. The claim was later dropped anyway. > http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2223125/90-year-old-shot-face-burglary-SUED-burglar-World-War-Two-veteran-fired-back.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2223125/90-year-old-... Not in the UK ("Filing his claim yesterday in California [...]"), and it seems that he didn't successfully sue (nothing reported, but I imagine it would get decent coverage if he won). Just a frivolous lawsuit by the looks of it. > http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1356388/Villagers-outraged-police-order-protect-garden-sheds.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1356388/Villagers-ou... More than likely this is just the police being overly cautious. The duty of care owed to a trespasser is fairly narrow, and the fact that it is a burglar may limit this further (e.g. if the burglar are injured by glass they broke, rather than an inadvertent trespasser falling onto exposed broken glass).
  - joseflavio 14y ago
    I am brasilian too, I could find this one [beware of strong images]: http://www.cidadeverde.com/asssaltante-morre-eletrocutado-dono-de-trailler-e-indiciado-por-homicidio-54052 http://www.cidadeverde.com/asssaltante-morre-eletrocutado-do... The thief tried to break into the a trailer but it had electric fences. The thief died electrocuted and the owner of the trailer is being accused of murder (facing charges and trial). I remember reading several others like this one, so this is real in Brasil.
    - illuminate 14y ago
      You cannot set up traps on your land in most countries.
    - analog 14y ago
      Yup, as other poster noted this would result in charges against the owner in the UK too. You can't use deadly force against someone for theft in most civilised countries.
      - thisone 14y ago
        You generally can't use deadly force against someone who is not threatening your life.
DanBC 14y ago
This is frustrating, but asking for correctly formed court documents is normal and good. In theory insurance should cover that. Or the thief, if they're ever caught.
deleted 14y ago
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edu 14y ago
I think it's good that Amazon is not disclosing any information about anybody without a court order. I'd be worried if they were disclosing their customers information to any police agent without a warrant!
- axelfreeman 14y ago
  It would be less frustrating if they said this in the first answer and don't let the customer run tho the police (twice).
  - ishansharma 14y ago
    Exactly. Making him and police send the mail and then refusing after telling that they would disclose is terrible on their side!
scorcher 14y ago
I'm not sure Amazon can give away your personal information without a court order. I think it breaks their terms and conditions and could get them in legal trouble. Unfortunate but really not Amazon's fault.
- DannyBee 14y ago
  It depends on the country.
kosmogo 14y ago
I would have hoped when i got my kindle stolen to have a way to declare it stolen at amazon and block it maybe ? after all it's paid with my account and my credit card, it's quite easy to find out.
- delinka 14y ago
  And when you sell the device but then later attempt to extort the new owner by reporting it stolen?
  - illuminate 14y ago
    How is that "extortion"?
    - delinka 14y ago
      "That's a nice e-reader you have there ... it'd be a shame if someone reported it stolen and it stopped working. Maybe you should send me another fifty bucks."
      - illuminate 14y ago
        Ah, well, ownership should be reliably transferable. This crap happens with cellphones (I had it happen to me with an eBayed Galaxy S3 last week...)
- megablast 14y ago
  The problem is that you can legally sell a kindle.
dante_dev 14y ago
maybe the thief is buying more books than you...[just kidding] xD
- thirdtruck 14y ago
  Almost happened to Wil Wheaton and his stolen Kindle: http://wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/20411186024/to-the-person-who-found-my-kindle http://wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/20411186024/to-the-person-...
analog 14y ago
And there's no real reason why you should count on Amazon's help. There are all sorts of risks providing this information, what if the request comes from a corrupt policeman working for a private detective (it happens). Requiring a warrant creates a paper trail. In the real world, if your stuff gets stolen, you're responsible, not the company you bought the product from.
- ledneb 14y ago
  "You're responsible" is a terrible thing to say. In "the real world"? So assuming you mean with non-digital/electronic goods? If someone steals my bag they don't go and register it with some central bag authority, so of course I don't go calling my bag's manufacturer. Of course I'm responsible. Unless it's on CCTV. I expect /those/ guys to be sane, to help me and to show the CCTV to the police. They have clear evidence of a crime sitting right in front of them - if I flag it up to them, it should be damn near their /duty/ to give that evidence to the police. Surely Amazon have pretty clear evidence in front of them. Someone's reported their kindle stolen, they see the kindle registered in someone else's name shortly after that report, the police have contacted them. Amazon can surely create their own paper trail - verifying the identity of the police first. Besides, the other post implies that they're saying there's no hard link between the kindle and the account. That's probably front-line support failing to get a message higher than their lazy supervisor. Anyway, I disagree with the sentiments here and in other replies. There are privacy warriors - quite rightly so - but there's also blatant common sense. Amazon should be applying that here. Putting on a tin-foil hat and saying "but what if..." isn't always a sensible thing to do. If you commit a crime and submit evidence of it to my web service, you can be damn sure I'm passing your details to the police, so long as it's legal for me to do so.
  - analog 14y ago
    In the real world as opposed to in an ideal world. The unfortunate fact is that police have more pressing issues to deal with than petty theft, no-one is going to be taking more than a second glance at any CCTV footage, and you're certainly not going to see it. Also with respect to 'privacy warriors' you have to way up the weights of the possible pros and cons. In the best case scenario you retrieve a piece of low value electronic equipment. Whoop-de-do. In the worst case, violent ex-husband finds the whereabouts of his ex-wife and assaults her, or worse.
deleted 14y ago
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solarflair 14y ago
If thieves take your car for a joyride, do you email Ford to complain?
- rmc 14y ago
  For a car, no. But if your credit card is stolen and then used, then yes, you contact your bank and they tell the police the details.
  - proparg 14y ago
    Because otherwise you'd have to pay for any transactions. The bank is preventing fraud, not tracking down thiefs.
    - d3c0d3dab0d3 14y ago
      they could prevent fraud by disabling the card.
- return0 14y ago
  What's the point of this analogy? Technology has advanced and it's normal to expect geolocating. If it was a tesla instead of a ford, i 'm pretty sure the owner would call them.
  - solarflair 14y ago
    The point of the analogy is that recovering and locating stolen property is the responsibility of law enforcement, not manufacturers & retailers.
- JanezStupar 14y ago
  You would if Ford had information about the current status of your car. E.g. - If your car was a Tesla, then I guess that turning to Tesla would be just the thing to do. When your cell phone get stolen, your mobile provider(s) are the right people to turn to. Or what exactly would you do?
bobsy 14y ago
People are talking about getting a warrant. Would police go to so much bother for such a low value device? Especially considering how the new owner of the device probably brought it off the thief at a market or something. It is unlikely the thief is actually using the device.
mtgx 14y ago
Why would you count on Amazon's help?!
ankitml 14y ago
I have exactly same story. Had spent a week struggling with Indian Police, and amazon did not help at all. Twice this has happened and I have not bought a third kindle although I desperately want it.
- jasonlotito 14y ago
  You sent in a court order and Amazon failed to comply?
  - ankitml 14y ago
    no, i sent them a scanned copy of the police document, in which i registered my kindle as lost device.
    - jasonlotito 14y ago
      That's meaningless. I wish I could be more sympathetic, but the reality is, you're expecting them to open up loopholes in their system that could be easily exploited.
      - ankitml 14y ago
        how? I am just asking them to track kindle which is registered with me. how is this a loophole?
chmars 14y ago
If your Kindle gets stolen, it's still your Kindle and Amazon should therefore disclose any information they have stored on your Kindle. The underlying problem seems to be that a Kindle can be registered by new users without consent from the current/last user. That is very irritating …
- uxp 14y ago
  > it's still your Kindle and Amazon should therefore disclose any information they have stored on your Kindle. What's to stop me from mentioning to a group of friends that I hardly use my Kindle anymore, and one of them offering me $50 for it? Is it still my kindle? Do I have to specifically de-register it before the exchange takes place? What if I beat my wife nightly and she takes off one day into hiding, taking our Kindle with her? Am I legally allowed to recover any location or usage information (assuming it contains that, like a Fire) to teach her a lesson that leaving me is a bad choice? One should be forced to obtain a warrant to obtain any information about a digital device (kindle/ipad/surface/galaxy) that is not the kind of information readily given by the operator of the underlying service to end users by default. It'll prevent a lot of shitty "edge cases" that unfortunately aren't uncommon, including unwarranted digital spying by law enforcement in the first place. I agree on the second point though. When one encrypts a disk on OSX, it requires a complete and painfully (to a lay-user) manual process to wipe that disk to reuse unencrypted if the encryption key is no longer available. The same process should be employed for re-registering any device without the knowledge of the previous registrant's information.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - Lagged2Death 14y ago
    What's to stop me from mentioning to a group of friends that I hardly use my Kindle anymore, and one of them offering me $50 for it? ... Do I have to specifically de-register it before the exchange takes place? Yes? Is this so different from selling someone a car, a cell phone, a video game console, etc.? What if I beat my wife nightly and she takes off one day into hiding, taking our Kindle with her? Am I legally allowed to recover any location or usage information (assuming it contains that, like a Fire) to teach her a lesson that leaving me is a bad choice? You are attempting to confuse a pretty simple issue of property rights by throwing some over-the-top moral issues and potentially bad outcomes into the mix, as if either the morals or the outcomes have a bearing on the property rights situation or the law. You might as well say "What if I steal a Kindle from Adolf Hitler? Should he be allowed to track me down?" The way things "should" be doesn't have a lot to do with this. In any case, if your abused wife took off with your LoJack or OnStar equipped car, I would expect the theft recovery people would, you know, recover the theft. They wouldn't ask you if you had stopped beating your wife first. They wouldn't first tell you to get the cops involved, then tell you they actually required a court order, then tell you that all data related to your car had been lost. For a relatively low-value item like a Kindle, perhaps it would have been a fair compromise to tell the owner "Sorry, all we can do is ban the unit from the Amazon network." But that's not what happened in this story.
brudgers 14y ago
The author's story is unfortunate. But this is not the tip of the iceberg. It is not a tragedy, either. A kindle costs about $100. The FBI won't get involved - even if you live in the United States. A person is lucky if local law enforcement cares. The expectation that a corporation should devote significant resources to international law enforcement over each petty theft is absurd.
- ishansharma 14y ago
  Lets leave the price for a minute, saying that this is not a tragedy is a bit insensitive. Even if it is $100 only, it is $100 only and saying that Amazon or anyone should not get involved for such a small amount is not at all fair.
  - brudgers 14y ago
    Wednesday, I received an email saying that David and Joanna had taken their son off life support. There was a car crash. He was a passenger in the other vehicle. Eric was twenty. It is beyond unfortunate. It wasn't particularly fair either. [edit] And downvoting this comment wasn't insensitive.
  - gamblor956 14y ago
    saying that this is not a tragedy is a bit insensitive. Compared to being robbed, raped, beaten, abused, starved, or murdered, I think that losing a luxury device to a non-violent theft is most definitely not a tragedy.
  - res0nat0r 14y ago
    Amazon is a selling goods on the internet as cheap as possible company, not a crime investigation company.
yareally 14y ago
Before modern day phones where you had direct control of GPS (circa 2004ish), I had my phone stolen and filed a police report. I called my phone company at the time (Sprint) and they would not lift a finger to use the built in GPS to find where it was despite the police standing in front of me at the time after I had filed the report. The police were willing to do something, but Sprint said they couldn't. Such things always made me question why they bothered mandating having GPS in "dumb phones" in the first place. Obviously there's other reasons, but none that seem to help consumers.
- ben1040 14y ago
  >Such things always made me question why they bothered mandating having GPS in "dumb phones" in the first place. Obviously there's other reasons, but none that seem to help consumers. The main purpose of GPS in dumbphones (and one which clearly is intended to help consumers) was to fulfill the enhanced 911 mandate so your geographic location can be transmitted to dispatchers when you dial 911.
danso 14y ago
I'm sorry....but the OP is being naive and is wrong to slam Amazon here. The protocol Amazon has established here is sound...are they supposed to deliver details of a device just because someone who was once registered to it demands so? In 99% of the cases, sure, no harm can come from it...but it's better for Amazon to adopt a clear line on this, so that their customer reps don't f--k up on the 1 percent of requests that are actually malicious social engineering attempts * I'm not without sympathy...I was once liberated of much more expensive devices at gunpoint...and it is frustrating that the tracking capability is limited, even with a police order.
- Lagged2Death 14y ago
  The protocol Amazon has established here is sound... The story I read could be summarized as: "Amazon has no protocol for stolen Kindles and flies by the seat of their pants instead, even if that means telling paying customers things that are not true."
  - danso 14y ago
    The OP did get misled but I'm not so sure it's jus Amazon making things up. Given the international boundaries involved here it is not a huge stretch to say that the initial rep was mistaken.
    - Lagged2Death 14y ago
      Yeah, that seems likely enough. What is the functional difference between running an organization that doesn't have protocol X and running an organization in which the boots on the ground - the people charged with implementing protocol X - do not know or follow protocol X?
  - diminoten 14y ago
    I'm sorry, but paying customers of what, exactly? Amazon's Kindle device? Amazon's Kindle store? Which of these products comes with a service which helps you find your stolen goods? Amazon offers this as a convenience feature, not as part of your purchase price of the Kindle. A purchaser of a Kindle is not entitled to this service.
rdl 14y ago
Amazon should have a way to mark Kindles as stolen, just as a purely commercial decision -- it makes people more willing to buy Kindles, and thus Amazon will make more money on books. Really, anyone selling expensive portable property which connects to a central registry as part of normal operation should want to do so, without being pushed by the government. It does reduce some replacement purchases, and might cut back on the secondhand market, but it's going to make people more willing to carry/use their devices, so it's probably a net win. I'd also be WAY more likely to buy used devices if there were a simple check for "has not yet been reported stolen" and then wait some days to finalize a purchase and "still has not been reported stolen", than I am now (where you can safely assume that almost any recent model device being sold used is stolen) (I suspect I buy enough Kindle books that if I reported one of my Kindles as stolen or unrecoverable-and-damaged, I'd get a free replacement, but I've probably got >$5k in Kindle books since I stopped buying paper books when the first Kindle came out. The irony is I pretty much use my iPad with kindle app as reader, now, because I really like backlighting and reading in a dark room.)
- dfc 14y ago
  So you think amazon would send you a free kindle if you reported the kindle that you are not using was stolen?
  - rdl 14y ago
    Probably, because I use the account a lot. Just not the devices (I probably have...12?) I use the DXes a fair bit, and use kindles when I'm outdoors, but I prefer to remain indoors generally.
  - illuminate 14y ago
    No, but depending on use I could certainly see it being good policy.
xxiao 14y ago
this is the typical crying-baby symptom in usa, it's not your fault, you're probably raised this way. grow up, you spoiled it, buy a new one, just like everything else in real life, Amazon is not your caring parents any more. sick of this kind of blog shown here.
Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
The issue is surely that the police are asking for data without the owners permission (and which isn't the original owner's data - the device yes, the data now on it, no). Are we saying that a third party should hand over data to the police without the owner of that data giving permission based solely on an allegation? Personally I'm not wild about that idea, it feels like something that could be very easily abused. We're very quick to demand full legal due process when someone wants access to private data held by a third party and we don't feel it should be surrendered it, but a consequence of that is that it pretty much becomes necessary to follow legal process in all instances because very few of them (including this one) are completely clear.

99 points by nathell 14y ago

This is not exactly a surprise to me, and I don't believe is purely Amazon fault, we have today in the world some very abrasive legal systems where liability is really dangerous. It is like the thief here in Brazil that broke his leg after his victim roof gave away, sued the owner of the house, and won.

AskHugo 14y ago
>the thief here in Brazil that broke his leg after his victim roof gave away, sued the owner of the house, and won. Source?
- speeder 14y ago
  Failed to find it :( It is a veeeery old thing. And so simple that I found lots of more or less similar stories, but not this particular one. (but found lots of interesting stuff on google...)
  - martey 14y ago
    "And so simple that I found lots of more or less similar stories..." It is a hallmark of urban legends. This story seems to originate with the case Bodine v. Enterprise High School, which involves a 19 year old on the roof of a high school who fell through a skylight covered with tar. Your tale seems more likely to stem from the 1990s movie "Liar, Liar": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119528/quotes?qt0372695 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119528/quotes?qt0372695
- madaxe 14y ago
  Not the same story, but very similar cases in the UK: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2074077.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2074077.stm http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2223125/90-year-old-shot-face-burglary-SUED-burglar-World-War-Two-veteran-fired-back.html#axzz2KJKEKrBz http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2223125/90-year-old-... (sorry for the daily fail link) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1356388/Villagers-outraged-police-order-protect-garden-sheds.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1356388/Villagers-ou...
  - kitbrennan 14y ago
    In none of those examples the criminal 'successfully' sued the victim (ie. won), they merely brought a frivolous case before the court.
  - stordoff 14y ago
    > http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2074077.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2074077.stm The farmer who shot him was jailed for manslaughter of the other burglar, so this isn't totally outrageous IMO. The claim was later dropped anyway. > http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2223125/90-year-old-shot-face-burglary-SUED-burglar-World-War-Two-veteran-fired-back.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2223125/90-year-old-... Not in the UK ("Filing his claim yesterday in California [...]"), and it seems that he didn't successfully sue (nothing reported, but I imagine it would get decent coverage if he won). Just a frivolous lawsuit by the looks of it. > http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1356388/Villagers-outraged-police-order-protect-garden-sheds.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1356388/Villagers-ou... More than likely this is just the police being overly cautious. The duty of care owed to a trespasser is fairly narrow, and the fact that it is a burglar may limit this further (e.g. if the burglar are injured by glass they broke, rather than an inadvertent trespasser falling onto exposed broken glass).
- joseflavio 14y ago
  I am brasilian too, I could find this one [beware of strong images]: http://www.cidadeverde.com/asssaltante-morre-eletrocutado-dono-de-trailler-e-indiciado-por-homicidio-54052 http://www.cidadeverde.com/asssaltante-morre-eletrocutado-do... The thief tried to break into the a trailer but it had electric fences. The thief died electrocuted and the owner of the trailer is being accused of murder (facing charges and trial). I remember reading several others like this one, so this is real in Brasil.
  - illuminate 14y ago
    You cannot set up traps on your land in most countries.
  - analog 14y ago
    Yup, as other poster noted this would result in charges against the owner in the UK too. You can't use deadly force against someone for theft in most civilised countries.
    - thisone 14y ago
      You generally can't use deadly force against someone who is not threatening your life.

DanBC 14y ago

This is frustrating, but asking for correctly formed court documents is normal and good. In theory insurance should cover that. Or the thief, if they're ever caught.

deleted 14y ago

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edu 14y ago

I think it's good that Amazon is not disclosing any information about anybody without a court order. I'd be worried if they were disclosing their customers information to any police agent without a warrant!

axelfreeman 14y ago
It would be less frustrating if they said this in the first answer and don't let the customer run tho the police (twice).
- ishansharma 14y ago
  Exactly. Making him and police send the mail and then refusing after telling that they would disclose is terrible on their side!

scorcher 14y ago

I'm not sure Amazon can give away your personal information without a court order. I think it breaks their terms and conditions and could get them in legal trouble. Unfortunate but really not Amazon's fault.

DannyBee 14y ago
It depends on the country.

kosmogo 14y ago

I would have hoped when i got my kindle stolen to have a way to declare it stolen at amazon and block it maybe ? after all it's paid with my account and my credit card, it's quite easy to find out.

delinka 14y ago
And when you sell the device but then later attempt to extort the new owner by reporting it stolen?
- illuminate 14y ago
  How is that "extortion"?
  - delinka 14y ago
    "That's a nice e-reader you have there ... it'd be a shame if someone reported it stolen and it stopped working. Maybe you should send me another fifty bucks."
    - illuminate 14y ago
      Ah, well, ownership should be reliably transferable. This crap happens with cellphones (I had it happen to me with an eBayed Galaxy S3 last week...)
megablast 14y ago
The problem is that you can legally sell a kindle.

dante_dev 14y ago

maybe the thief is buying more books than you...[just kidding] xD

thirdtruck 14y ago
Almost happened to Wil Wheaton and his stolen Kindle: http://wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/20411186024/to-the-person-who-found-my-kindle http://wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/20411186024/to-the-person-...

analog 14y ago

And there's no real reason why you should count on Amazon's help. There are all sorts of risks providing this information, what if the request comes from a corrupt policeman working for a private detective (it happens). Requiring a warrant creates a paper trail. In the real world, if your stuff gets stolen, you're responsible, not the company you bought the product from.

ledneb 14y ago
"You're responsible" is a terrible thing to say. In "the real world"? So assuming you mean with non-digital/electronic goods? If someone steals my bag they don't go and register it with some central bag authority, so of course I don't go calling my bag's manufacturer. Of course I'm responsible. Unless it's on CCTV. I expect /those/ guys to be sane, to help me and to show the CCTV to the police. They have clear evidence of a crime sitting right in front of them - if I flag it up to them, it should be damn near their /duty/ to give that evidence to the police. Surely Amazon have pretty clear evidence in front of them. Someone's reported their kindle stolen, they see the kindle registered in someone else's name shortly after that report, the police have contacted them. Amazon can surely create their own paper trail - verifying the identity of the police first. Besides, the other post implies that they're saying there's no hard link between the kindle and the account. That's probably front-line support failing to get a message higher than their lazy supervisor. Anyway, I disagree with the sentiments here and in other replies. There are privacy warriors - quite rightly so - but there's also blatant common sense. Amazon should be applying that here. Putting on a tin-foil hat and saying "but what if..." isn't always a sensible thing to do. If you commit a crime and submit evidence of it to my web service, you can be damn sure I'm passing your details to the police, so long as it's legal for me to do so.
- analog 14y ago
  In the real world as opposed to in an ideal world. The unfortunate fact is that police have more pressing issues to deal with than petty theft, no-one is going to be taking more than a second glance at any CCTV footage, and you're certainly not going to see it. Also with respect to 'privacy warriors' you have to way up the weights of the possible pros and cons. In the best case scenario you retrieve a piece of low value electronic equipment. Whoop-de-do. In the worst case, violent ex-husband finds the whereabouts of his ex-wife and assaults her, or worse.

deleted 14y ago

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solarflair 14y ago

If thieves take your car for a joyride, do you email Ford to complain?

rmc 14y ago
For a car, no. But if your credit card is stolen and then used, then yes, you contact your bank and they tell the police the details.
- proparg 14y ago
  Because otherwise you'd have to pay for any transactions. The bank is preventing fraud, not tracking down thiefs.
  - d3c0d3dab0d3 14y ago
    they could prevent fraud by disabling the card.
return0 14y ago
What's the point of this analogy? Technology has advanced and it's normal to expect geolocating. If it was a tesla instead of a ford, i 'm pretty sure the owner would call them.
- solarflair 14y ago
  The point of the analogy is that recovering and locating stolen property is the responsibility of law enforcement, not manufacturers & retailers.
JanezStupar 14y ago
You would if Ford had information about the current status of your car. E.g. - If your car was a Tesla, then I guess that turning to Tesla would be just the thing to do. When your cell phone get stolen, your mobile provider(s) are the right people to turn to. Or what exactly would you do?

bobsy 14y ago

People are talking about getting a warrant. Would police go to so much bother for such a low value device? Especially considering how the new owner of the device probably brought it off the thief at a market or something. It is unlikely the thief is actually using the device.

mtgx 14y ago

Why would you count on Amazon's help?!

ankitml 14y ago

I have exactly same story. Had spent a week struggling with Indian Police, and amazon did not help at all. Twice this has happened and I have not bought a third kindle although I desperately want it.

jasonlotito 14y ago
You sent in a court order and Amazon failed to comply?
- ankitml 14y ago
  no, i sent them a scanned copy of the police document, in which i registered my kindle as lost device.
  - jasonlotito 14y ago
    That's meaningless. I wish I could be more sympathetic, but the reality is, you're expecting them to open up loopholes in their system that could be easily exploited.
    - ankitml 14y ago
      how? I am just asking them to track kindle which is registered with me. how is this a loophole?

chmars 14y ago

If your Kindle gets stolen, it's still your Kindle and Amazon should therefore disclose any information they have stored on your Kindle. The underlying problem seems to be that a Kindle can be registered by new users without consent from the current/last user. That is very irritating …

uxp 14y ago
> it's still your Kindle and Amazon should therefore disclose any information they have stored on your Kindle. What's to stop me from mentioning to a group of friends that I hardly use my Kindle anymore, and one of them offering me $50 for it? Is it still my kindle? Do I have to specifically de-register it before the exchange takes place? What if I beat my wife nightly and she takes off one day into hiding, taking our Kindle with her? Am I legally allowed to recover any location or usage information (assuming it contains that, like a Fire) to teach her a lesson that leaving me is a bad choice? One should be forced to obtain a warrant to obtain any information about a digital device (kindle/ipad/surface/galaxy) that is not the kind of information readily given by the operator of the underlying service to end users by default. It'll prevent a lot of shitty "edge cases" that unfortunately aren't uncommon, including unwarranted digital spying by law enforcement in the first place. I agree on the second point though. When one encrypts a disk on OSX, it requires a complete and painfully (to a lay-user) manual process to wipe that disk to reuse unencrypted if the encryption key is no longer available. The same process should be employed for re-registering any device without the knowledge of the previous registrant's information.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- Lagged2Death 14y ago
  What's to stop me from mentioning to a group of friends that I hardly use my Kindle anymore, and one of them offering me $50 for it? ... Do I have to specifically de-register it before the exchange takes place? Yes? Is this so different from selling someone a car, a cell phone, a video game console, etc.? What if I beat my wife nightly and she takes off one day into hiding, taking our Kindle with her? Am I legally allowed to recover any location or usage information (assuming it contains that, like a Fire) to teach her a lesson that leaving me is a bad choice? You are attempting to confuse a pretty simple issue of property rights by throwing some over-the-top moral issues and potentially bad outcomes into the mix, as if either the morals or the outcomes have a bearing on the property rights situation or the law. You might as well say "What if I steal a Kindle from Adolf Hitler? Should he be allowed to track me down?" The way things "should" be doesn't have a lot to do with this. In any case, if your abused wife took off with your LoJack or OnStar equipped car, I would expect the theft recovery people would, you know, recover the theft. They wouldn't ask you if you had stopped beating your wife first. They wouldn't first tell you to get the cops involved, then tell you they actually required a court order, then tell you that all data related to your car had been lost. For a relatively low-value item like a Kindle, perhaps it would have been a fair compromise to tell the owner "Sorry, all we can do is ban the unit from the Amazon network." But that's not what happened in this story.

brudgers 14y ago

The author's story is unfortunate. But this is not the tip of the iceberg. It is not a tragedy, either. A kindle costs about $100. The FBI won't get involved - even if you live in the United States. A person is lucky if local law enforcement cares. The expectation that a corporation should devote significant resources to international law enforcement over each petty theft is absurd.

ishansharma 14y ago
Lets leave the price for a minute, saying that this is not a tragedy is a bit insensitive. Even if it is $100 only, it is $100 only and saying that Amazon or anyone should not get involved for such a small amount is not at all fair.
- brudgers 14y ago
  Wednesday, I received an email saying that David and Joanna had taken their son off life support. There was a car crash. He was a passenger in the other vehicle. Eric was twenty. It is beyond unfortunate. It wasn't particularly fair either. [edit] And downvoting this comment wasn't insensitive.
- gamblor956 14y ago
  saying that this is not a tragedy is a bit insensitive. Compared to being robbed, raped, beaten, abused, starved, or murdered, I think that losing a luxury device to a non-violent theft is most definitely not a tragedy.
- res0nat0r 14y ago
  Amazon is a selling goods on the internet as cheap as possible company, not a crime investigation company.

yareally 14y ago

Before modern day phones where you had direct control of GPS (circa 2004ish), I had my phone stolen and filed a police report. I called my phone company at the time (Sprint) and they would not lift a finger to use the built in GPS to find where it was despite the police standing in front of me at the time after I had filed the report. The police were willing to do something, but Sprint said they couldn't. Such things always made me question why they bothered mandating having GPS in "dumb phones" in the first place. Obviously there's other reasons, but none that seem to help consumers.

ben1040 14y ago
>Such things always made me question why they bothered mandating having GPS in "dumb phones" in the first place. Obviously there's other reasons, but none that seem to help consumers. The main purpose of GPS in dumbphones (and one which clearly is intended to help consumers) was to fulfill the enhanced 911 mandate so your geographic location can be transmitted to dispatchers when you dial 911.

danso 14y ago

I'm sorry....but the OP is being naive and is wrong to slam Amazon here. The protocol Amazon has established here is sound...are they supposed to deliver details of a device just because someone who was once registered to it demands so? In 99% of the cases, sure, no harm can come from it...but it's better for Amazon to adopt a clear line on this, so that their customer reps don't f--k up on the 1 percent of requests that are actually malicious social engineering attempts * I'm not without sympathy...I was once liberated of much more expensive devices at gunpoint...and it is frustrating that the tracking capability is limited, even with a police order.

Lagged2Death 14y ago
The protocol Amazon has established here is sound... The story I read could be summarized as: "Amazon has no protocol for stolen Kindles and flies by the seat of their pants instead, even if that means telling paying customers things that are not true."
- danso 14y ago
  The OP did get misled but I'm not so sure it's jus Amazon making things up. Given the international boundaries involved here it is not a huge stretch to say that the initial rep was mistaken.
  - Lagged2Death 14y ago
    Yeah, that seems likely enough. What is the functional difference between running an organization that doesn't have protocol X and running an organization in which the boots on the ground - the people charged with implementing protocol X - do not know or follow protocol X?
- diminoten 14y ago
  I'm sorry, but paying customers of what, exactly? Amazon's Kindle device? Amazon's Kindle store? Which of these products comes with a service which helps you find your stolen goods? Amazon offers this as a convenience feature, not as part of your purchase price of the Kindle. A purchaser of a Kindle is not entitled to this service.

rdl 14y ago

Amazon should have a way to mark Kindles as stolen, just as a purely commercial decision -- it makes people more willing to buy Kindles, and thus Amazon will make more money on books. Really, anyone selling expensive portable property which connects to a central registry as part of normal operation should want to do so, without being pushed by the government. It does reduce some replacement purchases, and might cut back on the secondhand market, but it's going to make people more willing to carry/use their devices, so it's probably a net win. I'd also be WAY more likely to buy used devices if there were a simple check for "has not yet been reported stolen" and then wait some days to finalize a purchase and "still has not been reported stolen", than I am now (where you can safely assume that almost any recent model device being sold used is stolen) (I suspect I buy enough Kindle books that if I reported one of my Kindles as stolen or unrecoverable-and-damaged, I'd get a free replacement, but I've probably got >$5k in Kindle books since I stopped buying paper books when the first Kindle came out. The irony is I pretty much use my iPad with kindle app as reader, now, because I really like backlighting and reading in a dark room.)

dfc 14y ago
So you think amazon would send you a free kindle if you reported the kindle that you are not using was stolen?
- rdl 14y ago
  Probably, because I use the account a lot. Just not the devices (I probably have...12?) I use the DXes a fair bit, and use kindles when I'm outdoors, but I prefer to remain indoors generally.
- illuminate 14y ago
  No, but depending on use I could certainly see it being good policy.

xxiao 14y ago

this is the typical crying-baby symptom in usa, it's not your fault, you're probably raised this way. grow up, you spoiled it, buy a new one, just like everything else in real life, Amazon is not your caring parents any more. sick of this kind of blog shown here.

Tyrannosaurs 14y ago

The issue is surely that the police are asking for data without the owners permission (and which isn't the original owner's data - the device yes, the data now on it, no). Are we saying that a third party should hand over data to the police without the owner of that data giving permission based solely on an allegation? Personally I'm not wild about that idea, it feels like something that could be very easily abused. We're very quick to demand full legal due process when someone wants access to private data held by a third party and we don't feel it should be surrendered it, but a consequence of that is that it pretty much becomes necessary to follow legal process in all instances because very few of them (including this one) are completely clear.