Topic: Another reason not to buy a Kindle.

[Nemesis]

Link to source  (You have to click on "What's this" to see it)

he Amazon Kindle and the Kindle Apps provide a very simple mechanism for adding highlights. Every month, Kindle customers highlight millions of book passages that are meaningful to them.

We combine the highlights of all Kindle customers and identify the passages with the most highlights. The resulting Popular Highlights help readers to focus on passages that are meaningful to the greatest number of people. We show only passages where the highlights of at least three distinct customers overlap, and we do not show which customers made those highlights.

The Most Highlighted of All Time passages have been highlighted by the most distinct customers. The Most Highlighted of All Time books are ranked based on a combination of number of highlighting customers and number of highlights. For Heavily Highlighted Recently passages and books the ranking is done in a similar fashion, but with a much greater emphasis on highlighting that was done recently over highlighting that was done a longer time ago.

Privacy violation.

[Brush Wolf]

Maybe not. This is likely mentioned 37 paragraphs into the Terms of Service agreement long after non lawyer eyes have glazed over and the brain is thinking about suicide. Not having a Kindle I would think you can turn off the sharing in the options.

[Nemesis]

Maybe not. This is likely mentioned 37 paragraphs into the Terms of Service agreement long after non lawyer eyes have glazed over and the brain is thinking about suicide. Not having a Kindle I would think you can turn off the sharing in the options.

I understand that you can (currently) turn it off, once you know it exists and find the option.  My point however is that is backwards.  You should have privacy by default and have to actively turn it off.

[EmeraldEdge]

You know, I was thinking of the scenario presented in Fahrenheit 451, and how preposterous many felt it could be.  It would be too hard.  Yet we are setting ourselves up, aren't we, by trading in our hard copies for books that can at any moment be edited or completely wiped away from your possession by those in control.   A simple line from a restructuring of the scenario might read "I remember the day they came for our books, and there was none."  I don't own an e-reader (although they do look cool, and I can see the allure).  I sometimes feel like I'm one of the last people actually buying actual books, but I believe I'll keep on doing so.

As far as the violation of privacy.  I suppose it's possible that it could just register a highlight and not where that highlight came from (unlikely).  At the very least that that information is not being stored.  I think it is only a matter of time until it is being stored (see google and they new system), and then we'll have the corporations combining our highlights/reading choices in order to "better serve" us with commercial opportunities, and the government gaining access and analyzing them in the name of National Security.  If it's not happening now, it's almost a just a matter of time.

[Javora]

I'm not sure that I'll have much of a choice but to buy one soon.  There have been three bookstores close in the last year.  Two of which were in my town, the other one was the closest one outside of my town and it was 50 miles away.  The only thing I have left is the used bookstores which may or may not have what I want or try to find what I want at Walmart, Meijer's, or Sam's Club.  That is of course if I don't go online, and IMHO if I do that I may just as well get a Kindle.  Ugh...

[EmeraldEdge]

The difference, of course, is that if you guy it online, you'll always have it until you, yourself, choose to get rid of it (whereas Amazon has already had a incidence where they removed titles from user's e-readers), and nobody will know what passages were of interest to you, unless you profess it elsewhere.