I’m sure it’s more complicated than I understand, but right now it sounds a lot like the type of page and asset caching that Opera uses (used?) for its mobile browser, or that some cable companies use to reduce download times for customers.

Since Amazon Silk essentially routes all of your web browsing on the Fire through Amazon’s servers, it also raises a significant privacy question, but so far today I haven’t seen many mainstream media types address that. After all the dorky excitement over consumer technology dies down, I imagine we’ll start seeing headlines like “Do you trust Amazon with your web browsing?” and “Amazon Silk lets Bezos watch your every move”.

Update: The Amazon Silk Terms and Conditions agreement mentions that you might have the option to turn off the Amazon server caching and browse the web as you normally would, but since the word “generally” pops up several times in that section, I don’t think Amazon is making any legally enforceable guarantee to absolute privacy. (And that’s if you can turn off the Silk functionality on the Kindle Fire at all—there’s some confusing wording in the Terms that suggests the Silk browser may be on a “computer” instead of the Fire tablet when this feature is offered.)

Keeping those two truisms in mind, here’s a question for you: Should you be worried about this new spate of articles and blog posts that raise privacy issues with Amazon’s new “Popular Highlights” service? I mean, sites like MSNBC and Techdirt are writing about it this week and suggesting it may be an invasion of your privacy.

The answer is NO, you should not be worried. It’s a fake news story. Here are two reasons why you shouldn’t care:

1. Amazon keeps all kinds of information about you. All online retailers do. If you think anonymous highlights are invasive, you probably shouldn’t be shopping online at all.

2. Only you can see your specific highlights.

The “Popular Highlights” only pulls the book title and highlighted passage, not your account info. It assembles everyone’s anonymous highlight data into a pool. When you look at a “Popular Highlights” passage, you’re looking at a snapshot of what all Kindle readers are reading and marking up. There’s no way to divine from that collection any personal info. If you think the popular highlights match your own highlights eerily well, then congratulations, it means you’re firmly part of the zeitgeist.

If you’re worried about Amazon storing your highlight information because it could theoretically be used against you by law enforcement officials or the government, you should be worried about everything you do with Amazon, not just the passages you highlight. (But to bring the paranoia back down to realistic levels, the courts have so far sided with bookstores on keeping such data private, even in this post-9/11 world.) And you should also take a moment to realize that every online retailer or service provider (Google, for example) tracks all kinds of data about you. If you really want to avoid producing a trail of data when you’re online, you need to seriously look into setting up anonymous proxies and avoid ecommerce and social networks entirely.

And finally, if you’re really concerned about privacy, you should know that there are far more invasive and worrisome privacy issues in your life right now. Look to the credit card companies and the entire credit ratings industry. This includes the big issuers like Mastercard, Visa, and American Express; national banks like Bank of America, Chase, and Citibank; and credit report companies like Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax. These companies thrive by collecting and interpreting data about you, including where you shop, what you buy, where you live, where you work, what’s going on in your personal life (i.e. marriages, divorces, childbirths, deaths), and how you relax.

Or take a look at the health insurance industry. It’s another industry that thrives on collecting and analyzing deeply personal data about you, in order to predict how long you’ll live, what diseases you’ll get, and how much of a risk you’ll be to insure.

But enough about those bigger data privacy issues. Let’s say you still don’t want to participate in Amazon’s “Popular Highlights” program. No problem! If you own a Kindle device, you can turn it off right now:

• On your Kindle, press the Menu button.
• In the pop-up menu, scroll down and select Settings.
• You’ll see your “Settings & Device Information” screen with your Registration info, Device Name, etc. Click the Menu button again.
• In the pop-up menu, scroll down to “Disable Annotations Backup” and click it.
• Now your bookmarks, notes, and highlights won’t be stored on Amazon’s servers.

Amazon says this option to turn off the service will be included in future versions of Kindle App software, but for now you can only turn it off via your Kindle device.

I do think privacy is a big issue with Internet services right now, but I don’t think Amazon’s “Popular Highlights” is a legitimate concern. If you want to look at more serious privacy concerns, I suggest you visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and read through some of their papers on preserving civil liberties online.

(_Max-B)

…three things–autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward–are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.

If so, you’re not alone. Over 1,600 Kindle readers have highlighted that sentence from Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers, making it the most highlighted passage of all time on the Kindle “Popular Highlights” website.

Popular whaaa? It’s a new service Amazon just released at the end of April, and it anonymously collects highlighted passages saved by readers and combines them. Any passage that at least three customers have highlighted is considered for the list, and then Amazon’s system ranks and displays them.

If the privacy issue doesn’t bother you (it doesn’t bother me, as it’s not personally identifiable information), it can be fascinating to see what people are drawn to. Outliers may contain the most highlighted passage, but it’s not the most highlighted book. That belongs to Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, with the Holy Bible (NIV) coming in second.

What else do people love to highlight? Well, all of the passages that make up the top 10 that aren’t from Outliers or The Lost Symbol are from from William P. Young’s The Shack.

View these lists for yourself at kindle.amazon.com/popular_highlights.

You can tell a lot about a person based on what he's reading... right?

Kevin Maney’s new article in The Atlantic, “The Kindle in Crisis,” doesn’t have a whole lot of new stuff to say on the topic of whether the Kindle is a good device or a bad device; if he wanted to talk about how the Kindle is inconvenient, there are plenty of usability and design issues to consider that he doesn’t.

I do think this quote is funny, though:

For example, the Kindle lets readers down with respect to one subtle but powerful element of the traditional book’s appeal: its role as an identity marker. Pulling out a particular book on an airline flight or in a doctor’s office can mean staking a claim to being a particular kind of person.

I’ve read a similar comment once before (see section III), and both times it made me smirk and lapse into my later teenage years, when everyone and everything ran the risk of making me seem “pretentious,” perhaps the worst fate that could befall me at that age. As a result, I lost pretty much all desire to use consumer products as cultural signifiers. Since a book is rarely handmade, isn’t it, too, a consumer product–the same as flashing a Nike logo on a shirt, or carrying a purse festooned with goofy YSL monograms?

My point, I guess, is that I don’t want other people to judge me based on what I’m reading, and I don’t read for other people. Or at least I strive not to (nobody’s perfect).

So that’s  a point for ereaders, as far as I’m concerned. Unfortunately, I can’t go so far as to say that they make you look less pretentious, since you’re trading off book jackets for a “lifestyle device” that, like it or not, will generate a lot of opinions about you among strangers.  Just note the animosity many have toward people with tell-tale white iPod earbuds.

“The Kindle in Crisis” [The Atlantic]

(Photo: Ed Yourdon)