This shows how paranoid I’ve become. MSNBC has a story about Amazon uploading notes and highlights taken on the Kindle is aggregating the data in such a way other people can view it.
Since the Kindle is able to sync things like notes and highlights I already knew they were being uploaded to Amazon’s servers. Likewise since the file storing said notes and highlights is a plain text file I assumed it wasn’t be encrypted. Finally I assumed the data was being sifted through and aggregated at some point. In other words I’m paranoid and trust nobody.
Well apparently Amazon wasn’t really doing anything with the data but will be soon. They’re trying to turn the Kindle into a social network reading device (yeah I just made that up and it’s officially my buzzword, wait this is under Creative Commons… crap). What Amazon is planning on doing is making popular highlights and such available for Kindle books.
If you don’t like this feature there is only one way I know of to disable it, never turn on the wireless card and do a sync operation. Either way you should know about this feature before they implement it and I’m sure Amazon will do everything in their power to not alert anybody of it.