Its Amazon Silk browser is technologically impressive, but it's also a big privacy concern

Oct 15, 2011 11:31 GMT  ·  By

The Amazon Kindle Fire promises to be a great device, at least for the price it's selling at. One of its less touted, but perhaps most impressive features is the Amazon Silk cloud browser.

Amazon Silk uses Amazon's powerful EC2 cloud service and its infrastructure to speed up browsing on the rather underpowered tablet device in a number of ways, from cutting down on connection time, to compressing and resizing images and rendering much of the web page content in the cloud.

From a technological stand point, it's quite impressive. From a privacy stand point, it's perhaps a bit worrisome. Or a lot worrisome if you're the type that assumes the worst about corporations and tech companies in particular.

That's because everything users do online on their Amazon Kindle Fire goes through Amazon. Every little thing, every site they visit, every page they see, every message they post.

Amazon promises that it will only use the data to enhance the browsing experience, for example, by predicting what pages users are going to go to next and start loading them in advanced.

But it's only a promise, it's almost impossible to know what goes on inside the Amazon cloud.

It's no wonder then that Silk is getting a lot of attention, before even being available, and not the good kind.

US Congressman Markey, who is co-chairman of the Congressional Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus, has concerns about Amazon Silk and has sent Amazon a letter (PDF) demanding more info.

Specifically, he wants to know exactly what data Amazon will collect from Fire users. Since it's clear that Amazon will be collecting at least 'some' data, he is also asking whether Amazon plans to sell this data or make it available to other companies.

The Congressman is also requesting that Amazon provide its privacy policy for the Kindle Fire for scrutiny. Finally, he wants to know whether users will have the ability to opt out of the data collection program.

The last question already has an answer, somewhat. It will be possible to switch off the Amazon cloud link and use Amazon Silk just as any browser, but it's unclear whether this will mean that all connections will be shut down or all data collection is stopped.

While there's plenty of grandstanding when politics and technology meet, these are all valid questions to which all Kindle Fire buyers, and there are many, would and should want to know the answer to.