e reading is, eeeeek, eerily dangerous.

I was never one for  buying books from  bookshops or borrowing them from libraries. My very eclectic collection of books came from places that gave no cash receipts  or asked for my name.  my reading left no "paper trail". That is not true any longer. Most of my reading is online and i know that i am leaving a electronic trail. i know i am being watched but am at an age where i don't give a damn. i have nothing to lose anymore. no job prospects that future employers might rethink after they have done their background  research on the  electronic trails that readers now leave behind.  I know now how free i was. How lucky to be that free.  I am crushed, though , at the thought of  crushed freedoms in our new all connected age.  Daryaganj on Sunday --  Zindabaad. Those books were a bargain  in more ways than i can count now. 

Amazon and Google, can now gather an astonishingly detailed portrait of our book-reading habits: what we buy, what we browse, the amount of time we spend on a page and even the annotations we make in an ebook. As campaigners have quipped, it's the equivalent of a bookshop hiring someone to follow you round the shop noting every book you pick up, then sitting at home with you while you read what you bought.

Defending the freedom to read is no longer only about battling against direct censorship in obscenity, blasphemy or libel cases. Since the digital revolution, it's now increasingly about protecting the freedom of the reader as much as the reading matter.

CS Lewis observed "We read to know that we are not alone", but at times that is exactly what we expect to be. The new possibilities for surveillance undermine the fundamental privacy of the act of reading. If readers, campaigners and civil liberties groups combined to assert the reading rights of us all, then that would be a force for change.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/31/readers-privacy-under-threat