On Kindle will reading highlights become ads?

In the same vein as that Facebook security leak that’s gotten Palau annoyed over at Prog Gold, here comes another scary story about how we’re losing our privacy and paying for the priviledge. This time it’s the Kindle that’s at the heart of it. Via Matt Ruff:

The Amazon Kindle, Kindle for iPhone and Kindle for iPad each provide a very simple mechanism for adding highlights. Every month, Kindle customers highlight millions of book passages that are meaningful to them.

We combine the highlights of all Kindle customers and identify the passages with the most highlights. The resulting Popular Highlights help readers to focus on passages that are meaningful to the greatest number of people. We show only passages where the highlights of at least three distinct customers overlap, and we do not show which customers made those highlights…

Matt invented a similar scheme for his novel Bad Monkeys, involving a bug in the spine of physical books noting how long you spent reading each page, so he’s a bit miffed somebody made his paranoid fantasy real. The next step is to sell ads based on this data… It reminds me slightly of the soup ads the German publisher of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels used to insert in his books. They’re not his publisher anymore.