Onyx Boox

Where to start on just how badly it seems privacy is not included with these eReaders? First, there’s how difficult it is to even safely purchase them. There are multiple websites that claim to sell these eReaders, unfortunately, many of these seem to be sketchy reseller scams sites. If you do decide to buy this product, do your homework and make sure you’re buying from the actual Chinese company’s website — shop.boox.com -— and not a questionable Russian reseller site like onyxboox.com. If you find them on Amazon, look that they are being sold by Onyx International Inc. Even then, it seems you could be getting a questionable product. At least Amazon has a good return policy.

Next, we could find no actual eReader privacy policy for these devices. The only privacy policy we could uncover was for the shop.boox.com website, not for the actual devices. So we have no idea what personal information they might be collecting or how they might be using it. In our journey around the internet to try and uncover what we could about these eReaders, we stumbled across a random Reddit thread where one Onyx eReader consumer posted their concerns about a privacy policy they got on their eReader after purchase. We’ll share that with you here with the caveat that it’s a Reddit thread so, you know, it’s not exactly a verifiable source.

We also couldn’t confirm these eReaders meet our Minimum Security Standards because, well, we couldn’t confirm much about these eReaders. The company didn’t respond to our emails requesting information. And there were no publicly available sources we could find to let us know if the company does basic things like use encryption, manage security vulnerabilities, or push security updates. The bottom line with Onyx Boox eReaders: absolutely assume that they come with privacy not included.