Amazon Kindle Exposes Passages You Highlight to the Mothership

“We show only passages where the highlights of at least three distinct customers overlap, and we do not show which customers made those highlights.”

That’s a good start, but it’s not entirely reassuring. There’s a very clear analogy here, I think: the titles of books in your living room bookcase are in plain view to a guest in your home, but I would bet you’d feel your privacy invaded if he were to start thumbing through volumes to tally all the dog-eared pages and highlighted paragraphs.

Nothing scares me more as a developer than being intimately aware of how companies collect personal and social data. It’s a bit like being a dairy farmer who doesn’t drink milk. I know a little too much about what’s going on behind the scenes. Our social values have evolved in a pre-digital era, and we simply don’t know how to deal with online databases, permalinked profiles, and the dissemination of personal (but not necessarily private) data.

We know anonymization doesn’t work. We know that behind the publicly accessible overview, there are database rows and access logs that are potentially revealing. But we haven’t confronted these issues as a society, and we haven’t cultivated a code of ethics for privacy in the digital era.