Amazon Tracks All Your Taps On Your Kindle

I was surprised to find out that Amazon tracks all of your taps on a Kindle. This was discovered by reporter Adrianne Jeffries and reported on Twitter.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have been surprised; there must be a mechanism for Amazon to be able sync your reading position between devices. The Verge discusses this in more detail.

It turns out that Amazon has a few answers to that, some more convincing than others. The main feature Amazon claims it needs the data for is the Kindle’s “Whispersync” functionality that allows for a reader to sync their exact place in a book between different devices, along with notes, highlights, and bookmarks. By tracking when you turn pages and which books you’re reading, Amazon says it can properly track where you are in a book and keep that data in sync. Amazon also says it uses the specific data here to power its “Reading Insights” features for tracking reading goals and celebrating milestones (sort of like fitness tracking, but for reading).

A more compelling answer is that Amazon uses insights from the data it collects to improve the Kindle software as a whole. “For example, we noticed that readers were tapping pages backwards and forwards in frequent succession, likely trying to flip back and forth between pages and reference different parts of a book. To address this, we have built several navigation features, including Page Flip and the ability for customers to continuously scroll through their book when reading.”

If this creeps you out, you can request that Amazon delete your personal data and then turn off Whispersync in your Kindle's settings, but you will lose the ability to keep your books or documents in sync between devices.