Kindle Fire privacy issues: Amazon blasted for being worse than Google OR Facebook
One of the most unexpected features of Amazon's new Kindle Fire was that it shipped with an all-new web browser, Amazon Silk - speeded up '20 times' by the power of Amazon's 'cloud' computing servers.
But the processes the Kindle Fire uses to 'speed things up' are already setting off privacy alarm bells.
British security company Sophos's Chester Wisniewski wrote in a blog, 'If you think Google AdWords and Facebook are watching you, this service is guaranteed to have a record of EVERYTHING you do on the web.'
Cyber-spy? The process Amazon uses to speed up web browsing by a reported '20 times' have come under scrutiny - and may offer the opportunity for privacy violation on the epic scale
'All web connections from your tablet will connect directly to Amazon, rather than the destination web page,' wrote Wisniewski, 'Hopefully you can start to see the problem here. All of your web surfing habits will transit Amazon's cloud.'
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Worse, the terms and conditions of Amazon's Silk browser make it clear that the company is entitled to retain your tablet's unique ID, plus the URLs of pages you have visited, for ! up to 30 days.
The idea isn't new - other browsers such as Opera's Mini already use similar technology - but Opera promises not to retain data.
Amazon is already selling the product at a reported $50 loss per tablet.
After Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos launched Kindle Fire this week an employee of rival Apple accused the Fire of privacy violations that would 'floor' users
'The concept is to use the power of Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud to retrieve web pages and pre-render any objects (or reduce their size) in a way that lowers the burden placed on the tablet,' wrote Wisniewski.
Naturally, Apple has also leapt on this as evidence that Amazon is up to no good.
Chris Espinosa, a senior employee at Apple - so senior, in fact, that he is Apple Employee number 8, and joined the company in 1976, when it still ran from Steve Jobs's garage, wrote, 'But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users.'
'Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet.'
'People who cringe at the privacy and data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazons opportunity here.'
Whiter than white? Apple's Chris Espinosa claims that Amazon's Silk browser allows the company access to information that 'every store lusts for'
'Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices theyre being offered there.'
Espinosa, though, clearly has an axe to grind, with Amazon aggressively undercutting the price of Apple's ! iPad 2 a nd hailed by tech insiders as the first 'serious' threat to the company's stranglehold on the tablet market.
Users who are seriously worried about the power of Amazon's cloud to track, watch and deliver advertising can simply turn the split-browser function off - although the company warns that this will slow things down.
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