What in the Amazon? Your Kindle highlights monitored


One of my RSS feeds, GTD Times, had a post telling us that Getting Things Done was the 5th most highlighted book on the Kindle. I took a look at the list of the 25 most highlighted books and asked myself, is Amazon cataloguing Kindle highlights?

The answer is: Yes, Amazon knows what you're highlighting and what notes you're writing!

According to the Amazon website:
If you have a Kindle device, you can turn off having your highlights in popular highlights by turning off Annotations Backup in Settings on your device. If you have a Kindle App, we will be adding this capability soon. Annotations BackUp backs up your annotations and last page read and syncs them across devices. 
So, here's the deal:
  • Those of us who have a Kindle device can avoid our reading habits being tracked, only if we have no way of synchronising our reads or recovering them in case our reader crashes.
  • Those of us reading Kindle books on our iPad or smartphone have no choice but to "share". 
Who was it that coined the term "lose, lose"?

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