Amazon Kindle Fire's Silk Browser Offers Speed, But No Privacy

If you were worried about Facebook catching your every virtual move even when you’re logged out with the help of tracking cookies then you haven’t seen anything yet.

Amazon turned up the heat on the tablet battlefield when it announced its brand new contender, the Kindle Fire tablet.

While many of us were enamored with the idea of finally having a decent tablet without breaking the bank, the potential privacy risks associated with the Fire’s mobile web browser, Silk, sneaked right on past us.

Silk is backed by the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which serves as an intelligent Web proxy. When you “visit” a website you’re not connecting to that site, but EC2 which will retrieve the page, optimize it for the Kindle Fire and then serve it up on a silver platter.

It’s great in the sense that it reduces latency, improves connection times, and minimizes the burden on the tablet to render objects which in turn gives you a better video & gaming performance.

The real problem lies with the fact that because everything is served through EC2, Amazon has a nice little record of all your surfing habits! That record, which can last up to 30 days mind you, will include *ALL* of the websites you visited, your IP address(es) & your Kindle Fire’s unique MAC address.

Aside from being monitored by your big Amazonian brother, it seems that HTTPS requests will be handled by EC2 too. Yes, Amazon will play man-in-the-middle by installing a trusted certificate in the Silk browser in order to accelerate SSL browsing as well.

Not too concerned about all of this? Keep in mind that Amazon is a US based company and thanks to the U.S. Patriot Act your recorded surfing data could be up for grabs should a U.S. Court order it.

Thankfully Amazon offers the ability to opt out of having websites served by EC2. All you have to do is make sure Silk is running in ‘off-cloud’ mode, at which point websites won’t come through EC2 before hitting the tablet screen.

Do you care if Amazon tracks your browsing history?  Would you be willing to use Kindle Fire’s Silk browser in its cloud-enhanced mode? Share your thoughts below!

Photo Credit: Amazon.com