[belorn]

I don't think that will ease anyone with privacy concerns. People who are against government surveillance is not against the police catching criminals and solving cold murder cases. The Golden State Killer case was a very good use of DNA profiling and DNA databases being used to catch a criminal. The problem is that many don't trust the government to only use it for those cases, and many others don't trust the technology to have a low enough false positive rate to not cause harm to innocent people.

Understanding how the book reader features are used in practice is good. Selling the same data to a advertiser is bad. Profiling people into predefined groups is bad, and the technology has risk of having false positives/negatives that reinforce stereotypes. The law has yet to catch up to treat information gathered by libraries and information gathered by a developer of e-readers as being very similar in risks.

[mumblemumble]

We can step outside of government examples, too, and find cases where corporations getting all data sciencey with this information have accomplished some pretty ucky - and also impossible to anticipate - things.

An instructive case here is Target figuring out that they could use customer purchase history to detect, with a pretty decent degree of confidence, when a customer was pregnant. They then proceeded to use this model to send out mailings, and those mailings resulted in people being outed in rather compromising and potentially seriously harmful ways.

[Cyphase]

Here's the Target story from 2012: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....