privacy of annotations & highlights

[49Kat]

I'm baffled and a little creeped out.

I have a Kindle paperwhite and Kindle apps on my iPhone and iPad. I was waiting for an appointment and I had my iPhone with me and I decided to read a book while I was waiting. I downloaded a book in progress to my Kindle app on the iPhone. What I noticed is highlights in places in the book that I hadn't put there. There was also a note I hadn't put there. I hadn't gotten that far in the book yet on my other devices.

Now I am wondering about the privacy of the notes I have made in other books. These were notes and highlights that I was not intending to share. I don't see anywhere in the settings where I can determine whether or not my notes and highlights are private or not. I have no desire to see other people's notes either.

I have checked my account and all of the devices are correctly registered to the same account. I synchronized the iPhone and the Kindle device. The foreign highlights and notes continued to be present on the iPhone and not on the other devices.

I finally removed the book from the iPhone and redownloaded it. The foreign highlights and notes are now no longer there.

I do have a Goodreads account but I haven't been active on it for a long time, and none of my devices are linked to it.

Can anyone shed any light on this?

[CWatkinsNash]

Are you sure that your Goodreads account isn't linked to your Amazon account? Because the annotations you see are supposed to be from people you follow there and on Amazon who have either shared them from the device / app or made them public on Goodreads, as far as I know.

The "popular highlights" feature is separate, as that shows the most popular passages highlighted in Kindle books by all users.

Both of these can be turned off in Reading Options so that you don't see them (should they turn back up). Since they weren't there when you re-downloaded the book, it may have just been a glitch where the app loaded it without acknowledging your settings.

My highlights and annotations show up on my Goodreads account but they are private by default unless I choose to share them directly or make them public later.

If you're certain that your Goodreads account isn't linked to Amazon (you can verify by going to Goodreads > Account Settings > Apps) then I'd contact Amazon and make them aware of it.

[tomsem]

Things you share to goodreads do not get pushed to your followers who also happen to be on Kindle platform. You have to make them public, and they have to go to goodreads to read these. I wish that feature existed, though!

If you lend out a Kindle to someone (without turning off the Whispersync setting on it) then annotations they make will show up. But that seems not to be what is happening in this case, as the ‘extra’ highlights and notes eventually went away. Or of course if they get deleted on one device they’ll go away on the other devices that have Whispersync enabled.

[CWatkinsNash]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Things you share to goodreads do not get pushed to your followers who also happen to be on Kindle platform. You have to make them public, and they have to go to goodreads to read these. I wish that feature existed, though!

The Public Notes setting under Reading Options > Highlights & About this Book states that it "shows highlights and notes from other people that you follow in the Kindle community" so that's where that part of my post came from. I don't know if it works as described as I keep it turned off.

[Deskisamess]

There are also editions of some Kindle books that are "Oprah Book Club" editions, that contain notes and highlights from Oprah that can't be turned off.

This info in on the book's product page:

The newest Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 selection: this special eBook edition of The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd features exclusive content, including Oprah’s personal notes highlighted within the text, and a reading group guide.

Please note there is another digital edition available without Oprah’s notes.

[49Kat]

Thank you to all of you who responded. Family stuff, haven’t had time to go into this too deeply. I double checked, my kindle account isn’t linked to Goodreads. I think I will end up deleting my Goodreads account. I don’t use it anymore, and I don’t have friends or followers there.
I do follow some authors on Amazon.com, but that shouldn’t result in sharing of notes and highlights, right?

I did notice the highlights seemed pretty random—words and phrases that, really, it wouldn’t have made sense to highlight. The actual note was a bit disturbing. My account and devices are not shared with anyone.

I haven’t contacted Amazon yet. I’ll perhaps chalk this up to a glitch of some kind. I was happy to see that removing the book from the device and redoing the download corrected the issue. I do take this as a warning that notes may not be so private after all.

[tomsem]

It doesn’t matter if you link a Goodreads account or not. Sync is one way (from Kindle platform to Goodreads).

Tellingly, these highlights an notes never synched to your account but were confined to this particular device, else the re-download would have restored them. I suspect data corruption to the sidecar files containing them is a strong possibility. Sync could fail as a result, and random highlighting could result as it tries to make sense of what is in the corrupt file.

The other theory involves a cat playing with your Kindle.

My reasoning is somewhat motivated but I don’t think there’s evidence of privacy breach.