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

http://vaultausir.blogspot.com/2013/02/your-kindle-got-stolen-dont-count-on.html

by nathell • 13 years ago

99 99 13 years ago

vaultausir.blogspot.com

speeder2• 13 years 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• 13 years 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?

speeder2• 13 years 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...)

madaxe• 13 years ago

Not the same story, but very similar cases in the UK:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2074077.stm

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-ou...

joseflavio• 13 years ago

I am brasilian too, I could find this one [beware of strong images]:

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.

DanBC3• 13 years 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.

edu• 13 years 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• 13 years 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).

ishansharma2• 13 years ago

Exactly. Making him and police send the mail and then refusing after telling that they would disclose is terrible on their side!

scorcher• 13 years 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.

DannyBee2• 13 years ago

It depends on the country.

kosmogo• 13 years 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.

delinka2• 13 years ago

And when you sell the device but then later attempt to extort the new owner by reporting it stolen?

illuminate5• 13 years ago

How is that "extortion"?

megablast• 13 years ago

The problem is that you can legally sell a kindle.

dante_dev• 13 years ago

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

thirdtruck• 13 years ago

Almost happened to Wil Wheaton and his stolen Kindle:

http://wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/20411186024/to-the-person-...

analog4• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

analog4• 13 years 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.

brudgers3• 13 years ago

"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."

The contents of a police report are allegations not facts. The evidence is ambiguous. Persons sell items and then report them stolen. It is quite reasonable for Amazon to refuse to adjudicate disputed ownership of $100 worth of hardware.

Amazon's responsibilities differ with respect to the digital goods in their care. Those are tied to an individual in a way that a physical device is not.

officemonkey• 13 years ago

On the other hand, if the company collects data on the device for their purposes, that data should be shared with the authorities.

jasonlotito3• 13 years ago

And, from what I gather, they will, given the proper paper work is filed. Otherwise, this leaves open a loophole that can be exploited.

solarflair2• 13 years ago

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

rmc• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

Because otherwise you'd have to pay for any transactions. The bank is preventing fraud, not tracking down thiefs.

return0• 13 years 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.

solarflair2• 13 years ago

The point of the analogy is that recovering and locating stolen property is the responsibility of law enforcement, not manufacturers & retailers.

JanezStupar• 13 years 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?

EwanToo• 13 years ago

If it was a $50,000 car, I'd expect the police to put in a fair bit more effort to recovering it than a $50 kindle.

When your cell phone gets stolen, the police are the right people to turn to, not your network provider.

protomyth2• 13 years ago

If you have Ford's version of OnStar, then yes you do and they lock the damn car down.

Amazon has control over the devices they sell you. They seem to use this power to purge books from your device. They could be a bit more helpful and lock the device and provide law enforcement the information. Asking for a warrant or other court order is just making an economic decision not a moral one.

Tyrannosaurs4• 13 years ago

That's a separate paid for service specifically designed for this.

bobsy• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

Why would you count on Amazon's help?!

ankitml4• 13 years 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.

jasonlotito3• 13 years ago

You sent in a court order and Amazon failed to comply?

ankitml4• 13 years ago

no, i sent them a scanned copy of the police document, in which i registered my kindle as lost device.

chmars2• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

Lagged2Death6• 13 years 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.?

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.

manojlds• 13 years ago

How is being able to register again the problem? If not for that, there is no scope of finding the device, right?

If I lost my kindle, I would be hoping someone is foolish enough to register the device again. Or rather, after reading this, I would have been the fool.

chmars2• 13 years ago

As the already registered Kindle owner, I would expect Amazon to ask me for a confirmation – similar to the change of my mail address:

'[Name/address/…] registered your Kindle. Please confirm […].'

brudgers3• 13 years 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.

ishansharma2• 13 years 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.

brudgers3• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

Amazon is a selling goods on the internet as cheap as possible company, not a crime investigation company.

yareally• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

danso4• 13 years 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.

andrewcooke• 13 years ago

isn't that why they ask for details of the police case? (so it's not just at the whim of the owner; it has to be associated with an official investigation)

danso4• 13 years ago

A police report is different than a court issued warrant. With a police report you can file with your insurance as proof for reimbursement. But in the OP's case, he is asking for Amazon to do a form of surveillance...I.e tell me who's name is on a device that is not in my possession. A warrant is a higher level of justification

Lagged2Death6• 13 years 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."

danso4• 13 years 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.

diminoten2• 13 years 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.

speedyrev• 13 years ago

I know for a fact that they don't fully cooperate even when law enforcement is involved. Most LEO's won't jump through the hoops over and over when there are more important cases to work on.

Xylakant2• 13 years ago

> I know for a fact that they don't fully cooperate even when law enforcement is involved.

Nor should they. Let's construct a little far-fetched case where police officer X tries to spy on woman Y and asks amazon to retrive information for account of Y. That's what a court order is supposed to restrict. The police actually can do very little without a warrant, and that's for a reason.

edanm• 13 years ago

Agreed, this is a complete non-story.

I also think if Amazon did give the information, the HN crowd would be up in arms about a violation of privacy (correctly). This is exactly the kind of channel that easily gets hacked in social-engineering efforts.

The only thing that was wrong here was that the initial customer service rep. said that a police report would be enough, but... that's it. One mistake by one customer service rep.

(P.s. if the op is reading this - sorry about the stolen Kindle, I'd be upset too in your situation. I just don't think you should be upset with Amazon - I'd rather large corporations not go into spying and crimefighting)

rdl2• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

So you think amazon would send you a free kindle if you reported the kindle that you are not using was stolen?

rdl2• 13 years 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.

illuminate5• 13 years ago

No, but depending on use I could certainly see it being good policy.

Tyrannosaurs4• 13 years 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.

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

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