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Reason No. Eleventy-BIllion I Don't Use a Kindle Anymore

‘They know us better than we know ourselves’: how Amazon tracked my last two years of reading | Technology | The Guardian:

Amazon says it does not share what individual customers have highlighted with publishers or anyone else, a spokeswoman said. The highlights are logged to sync reading progress and actions across devices, she said. Aggregated data is used to show which parts of books have most frequently been highlighted, as Kindle customers can see while reading. 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.

From my reading history, which included books on self-help and mental health, Amazon could easily make inferences about my personal health, career and hobbies. 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 is hard for us to wrap our minds around what artificial intelligence enables Amazon to do with this data,” she said. “The kinds of nuanced correlations Amazon is able to find through analyzing that data is beyond what we can conceptualize as human beings.”

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