There has been some alarm over a new Amazon Kindle enhancement that collects and shares highlighted text. I will confess that I’ve evolved into a lazy Kindle user who for the most part just downloads and reads e-books on the device without paying too much attention to new enhancements to functionality so I needed the blog post on gigaom to find out that this was happening. I do use the highlight feature quite a bit at times and I also take notes. I briefly visited a Kindle board a few months ago where people were saying they never use the note taking feature and don’t even know how it works. I can’t imagine reading and not making notes but – but then again these are probably the same people who read 400 page books in half an hour. If you tend to stop and comment regularly like I do – the going is a lot slower. Here’s something to keep in mind about Kindle notes. You can copy and paste your clippings from your Kindle to a document on your computer. You can empty out your clippings document on your device, but all clippings are stored on an amazon server and you cannot delete that content, in fact Kindle users don’t know where the data backup is.
Here’s what the notes look like when you download them:
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Michael Jackson: The Magic, The Madness, The Whole Story, 1958-2009 (J. Randy Taraborrelli)
- Note Loc. 1547 | Added on Sunday, xxxx 18, 20xx, 01:50 AMjrt needs to get the ages right and stick w/ them
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Killing Willis: From Diff’rent Strokes to the Mean Streets to the Life I Always Wanted (Todd Bridges)
- Note Loc. 1741 | Added on Wednesday, xxxx 28, 20xx, 11:16 PMwhy did i think this was earlier?
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These notes could easily be extracted and shared if amazon chose to and that could be a much bigger privacy violation than highlight sharing. But it is also true that without context the notations can be fairly meaningless. It takes paid analysts with access to user ids, to make connections between notes made across multiple publications read on a single device and build a profile. Without this analysis the notes are random anonymous text floating around in the global mind miasma, and far less revealing than something you’d voluntarily share on twitter or face. I confess that even before I knew about the shared highlighting, I have been mindful about what I highlight or write on Kindle but this is no different than how I’d treat a print book because I often lend books to friends and family members. Unless you live alone and never plan to share your books with anyone, you wouldn’t scrawl things you don’t want people to know in the margins of your print books because this could be similar to sharing your diary. It makes sense to treat books that you read on your Kindle device in the same way.
Filed under: Books, Technology, enhancements, highlights, kindle, notes, privacy violation
. This is a good show because it’s not your typical reality tv where we follow the participants around waiting for them to do dumbazz quirky or shocking things. The stars of this show are all 50 something and the presentation is very dignified. It has plot, characterization, tension, and even some surprises (no spoilers ever here!) . Plus the photography is lovely. This is a show you could watch even if you weren’t a fan of the Jacksons because it is a very good story in and of itself that happens to be a true story. As we all know – the best stories pretty much write themselves.
