(2020-02-03) They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves How Amazon Tracked My Last Two Years Of Reading

'They know us better than we know ourselves': how Amazon tracked my last two years of reading. When I requested my personal information from Amazon this month under California’s new privacy law, I received mostly what I expected: my order history, shipping information and customer support chat logs. But tucked into the dozens of files were also two Excel spreadsheets, more than 20,000 lines each, with titles, time stamps and actions detailing my reading habits on the Kindle app on my iPhone.

On 21 May 2019 I highlighted an excerpt from the third installment of the diary of Anaïs Nin, the data shows, and on 23 August 2018 at 11.25 pm, I highlighted an excerpt from Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath. On 27 August 2018, I changed the color of a highlighted portion of that same book.

Other habits tracked included the times I copied excerpts from books into my iPhone’s clipboard and how often I looked up definitions of words in Kindle’s attached dictionary.

Amazon says it does not share what individual customers have highlighted with publishers or anyone else, a spokeswoman said.

Though Amazon says it is not currently sharing the insights gleaned from reading habits with anyone else, that the company holds on to the data shows it could be used in the future, said Alastair Mactaggart, an advocate who co-wrote the ballot measure behind the California Consumer Privacy Act.