Many of these companies just scoop up as much data as they can without knowing how it will be used Alastair Mactaggart Even the time of day I read or the speed at which I turn pages can provide insights on personal traits, said Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. It does say the data is used “to provide customers with products and services, pay content providers and improve the reading and shopping experience”, the spokeswoman said.įrom my reading history, which included books on self-help and mental health, Amazon could easily make inferences about my personal health, career and hobbies. Aggregated data is used to show which parts of books have most frequently been highlighted, as Kindle customers can see while reading. The highlights are logged to sync reading progress and actions across devices, she said. Who is this information shared with, what is done with it, and how can it affect my privacy – and the future of the reading experience itself?Īmazon says it does not share what individual customers have highlighted with publishers or anyone else, a spokeswoman said. But the extensive tracking of my reading habits – my most beloved and previously offline hobby – was jarring. I already understood Amazon tracks our purchases on its site, our activity across the web, our voice commands, our grocery shopping and our locations. Other habits tracked included the times I copied excerpts from books into my iPhone’s clipboard and how often I looked up definitions of words in Kindle’s attached dictionary.

On 27 August 2018, I changed the color of a highlighted portion of that same book.

On I highlighted an excerpt from the third installment of the diary of Anaïs Nin, the data shows, and on 23 August 2018 at 11.25 pm, I highlighted an excerpt from Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath. And Amazon knows more than just what books I’ve read and when – it also knows which parts of them I liked the most.

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