We don’t click that embarrassing link or read that weird book, even though doing so might change the way we think about the world. When our intellectual privacy is breached, our reading and thinking incline to the boring, the bland, and the mainstream. But being watched when we’re reading (or watching videos) isn’t merely disconcerting as I argue in a new book, it strikes at the core of our ability to make up our minds about the world. There’s no indication that Amazon has done anything particularly unsettling with this data or that individual user information has leaked (yet). And the problems of e-readers also apply to any digital technology we use to read or view, whether the surveillance-based advertising of the “free” Web or the new Samsung TVs whose voice recognition interface can capture and upload living-room conversations for cloud analysis.

Electronic books, by contrast, can read you more deeply than you read them. Paper books might be hard to obtain, but once in hand, they have privacy built into their little paper pages.

The way that its Kindle is engineered allows Amazon to know not just what she is reading, but whether she has finished the book, what page she is on, how long she has spent on each page, and which passages she might have highlighted, maybe to return to in a more private setting. The other passengers might have had no idea what she was reading, but Amazon did. Consider the publicist’s hypothetical early reader of Fifty Shades of Grey, carrying her Kindle on the London Tube. Amazon knows more about your Kindle reading than the clerk in that bookstore in the next town, more than your librarian, and in fact more than anyone has ever known about how we read. But the ease of digital delivery masks a paradox of e-reader privacy-they know exactly who you are and what, when, how much, and how often you have read your e-books.

Fifty shades of gray book free