Oct 16, 2023 07:00:00

How much does Amazon track Kindle users' 'reading information'?

In 2018, California passed

the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) , which gives consumers more control over their data and allows residents to force businesses to disclose their personal data. became. In January 2023, the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), which amended the CCPA and became more powerful, came into effect.According to users who requested personal information from Amazon under this law, their order history It has been reported that, in addition to information on Kindle and delivery, details such as the title and number of pages of books read on the Kindle were recorded.

'They know us better than we know ourselves': how Amazon tracked my last two years of reading | Amazon | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/03/amazon-kindle-data-reading-tracking-privacy

Kari Paul, who posts technology articles for the foreign media The Guardian, requested Amazon's personal data based on CCPA. Then, in addition to the expected contents such as order history, shipping information, and customer support chat logs, it was found that a spreadsheet like the one shown in the image below was included with a volume of over 20,000 lines. The spreadsheet records the titles, timestamps, and actions of the Kindle books he has purchased, and records Paul's 'reading habits' in detail.

Furthermore, the data disclosed includes not only information about when and how much a user has read, but also what the reader liked about the book. According to Paul's data, 'I highlighted ' The Diary of Anais Nin ' on May 21, 2019' and 'I highlighted ' The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath' on August 23, 2018 at 11:25 p.m.' '' and changed the color of the highlight on August 27th.'' In addition, it included the number of times and contents of sentences copied and saved to the clipboard, words looked up in the Kindle dictionary, etc.

'I already understood that Amazon was tracking my purchases on the site, my movements on the site, my voice commands, my purchases, and my location,' Paul said. 'But Amazon also tracked my reading habits extensively. I felt uncomfortable knowing what I was doing. Who would this information be shared with? What would be done with it? And what would that mean for my privacy and the future of the reading experience itself? Is there a possibility that it will have a negative impact?' he commented.

'We only record your Highlights to sync your reading progress and book actions across devices, and we don't share them with publishers or anyone else,' an Amazon spokesperson said. is the answer. In addition, the highlights will be displayed as aggregated data as ``Places that are highlighted a lot in this book,'' but the content will not be made public as a way to identify individuals.

The Engelberg Center at New York University School of Law points out in a paper that with the growth of the e-book market, ``selling user data about book purchases and reading experiences could become a new source of income.'' In addition, the Engelberg Center states, ``The e-book market is a new market structure in which legal and technological changes tend to prioritize the interests of publishers and platforms over the interests of buyers and readers.'' I am.

What is the future outlook for the e-book economy that has become ``purchase without owning''? -GIGAZINE

'It's hard for us to see how artificial intelligence will allow Amazon to use this data,' said Stacey Mitchell of the nonprofit Community Self-Reliance Research Institute . The subtle correlations that can be discovered go beyond what we can conceptualize as humans; even the time of day we read or the speed at which we turn pages can be used to reveal personal characteristics.' Masu. Alastair McTaggart, who co-created the foundations of CCPA, said: 'Many of these companies may simply collect as much data as possible without specifying how it will be used. The truth is, these beings know us better than we know ourselves,' he said of data collection concerns.