You know, I actually never noticed that. Is that another cool whizbang feature on the site? Somewhere along the line I got it into my head that upvotes were just how you favorited things.

Well. Time to start indexing my upvotes... (later...)

But I think the "favorites" are publicly view-able, isn't it? Is there any way to make them private?

From viewing my profile it appears that they are public. I've never actually used it, just noticed the feature a while back. I've been using Instapaper for ages for my "read later" links.