Amazon is Tracking the Most-Highlighted Kindle Passages
May 19th, 2010DISCLOSURE: Cryptogon is an Amazon affiliate.
Now, the piece below states that Amazon, “Doesn’t show which customers made the highlights.”
Let me translate that for you: The NSA knows which customers made the highlights. These will add welcome subtleties to your MAIN CORE file, don’t you think?
All of this led me to wonder: Just what, exactly, is the Kindle transmitting to Amazon?
It’s not just the highlights.
You’ve love this. It’s from Amazon Kindle: License Agreement and Terms of Use:
Information Received. The Device Software will provide Amazon with data about your Device and its interaction with the Service (such as available memory, up-time, log files and signal strength) and information related to the content on your Device and your use of it (such as automatic bookmarking of the last page read and content deletions from the Device). Annotations, bookmarks, notes, highlights, or similar markings you make in your Device are backed up through the Service. Information we receive is subject to the Amazon.com Privacy Notice.
I wonder what the U.S. National Security Agency thinks about Amazon.com’s Privacy Notice?
Some readers thought that I was absolutely nuts because of my initial assessment of the Kindle back in 2007:
I personally wouldn’t go near that device because it’s brimming with DRM nonsense… Again, I’d encourage you to avoid that thing…
And that was before I knew that it was phoning user generated content back home for “backup”. *sigh* As usual, it’s not that bad. It’s worse.
Via: Christian Science Monitor:
Amazon is now displaying a list of the passages that readers most often highlight on their Kindles. Is that intrusive?
Tracking bestselling books tells us about the reading habits, or at least buying habits, of the American public. But is there anything we can learn from tracking what information people consider important in those books?
We may find out, because Amazon is now displaying lists of the passages and books most heavily highlighted on the Kindle. It’s a relatively small sample – the current #1 passage, from Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller “Outliers”, was highlighted by 1,698 Kindle users. (For the record, it was this: “[T]hree things – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward – are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.”)
The entire Top 10 list of highlighted quotes was made up of “Outliers” and fellow bestsellers “The Shack” by William P. Young, and “The Lost Symbol” by Dan Brown. In the category of most highlighted books, “The Lost Symbol” beat out the Bible for the #1 spot. I assume that says more about the narrow sampling parameters and the demographics of Kindle users than the depth of Brown’s prose.
Business management website Bnet worried that publishing such information could erode consumer trust. Amazon notes on its website that it doesn’t show which customers made the highlights.
my 1st thought re the Kindle was “that’s cool, I read a fuck of a lot and it would be neat to just download the book without the ‘leftovers'(I don’t keep my books unless they are really good or else I would be like on those TV ‘hoarders’, wandering between towering stacks of shit I read; I either trade them at a book re-seller, give them away or recycle my mags and papers…)” but then I thought about how much I kind of like the whole process of going to a book store and wandering the aisles, how I like the smell of books, the paper, how different the quality varies between different types of books in regard to paper, binding, fonts, ink, etc., and the whole industries that depend on us readers to buy the books, from the writers to the publishers to the paper companies to the shippers to brick and mortar bookstores and now, reading this, I am glad I didn’t buy in…Books, to me, are one of the few things still produced that still seem to have some intrinsic value beyond its 1st use, able to be used by multiples of users, friends, family members or some bum in the street who needs to build a fire…
And if Amamzon is doing this with their Kindle, what do you suppose Microsoft is doing with Windows OS? Most of the world runs with Microsoft – it’s a great “terrorist” spying tool. No wonder Windows is always being updated for one thing or another. If hackers can get in then so can spying authorities – it’s full of holes – on purpose.