Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Privacy
Users want their web browser to provide faster speed and not let them wait very long for pages to load. There is a lot of information that must be accessed quickly, and that is why innovations and improvements in web browsing technology are always being done. Almost every day, new products are placed on the market, promising better online experiences and improved features. Amazon will release its newest tablet, Kindle Fire, on November 15, 2011. They anticipate that this will be the closest rival of the iPad.
Equipped with Silk as its browser, the product is a full-color, 8GB, 7-inch multi-touch tablet. Among its new features are faster surfing speeds and increased battery life, which are probably its major advantages. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 will be used to route all web connections from the Kindle Fire to the web page. This process is relatively new compared with what is now available on the market. From the user’s end, “everything” between him and the internet passes through Amazon’s EC2.
Privacy concerns arose when people came to know that their privacy will again be exposed to risks. In one of his articles, a blogger wrote that all of the user’s web surfing habits will pass through Amazon’s EC2. He added that there is no doubt Amazon will have the opportunity to follow all of the user’s online activities. Amazon, in its Terms and Conditions for using Silk, declared that URLs and certain identifiers will stay in its server for 30 days.
Data mining possibilities were again mentioned to be another risk that users will face. Every activity performed by Fire users could be captured and controlled by Amazon. Image that every page that users visit, every link that they follow, every click that they make, is known to Amazon. If users did not receive Facebook’s Timeline well, how could they “accept” this one, which is pretty much the same as Timeline? These were only some of the concerns that users have brought up in anticipation of the product’s impact.
Amazon emphasized that Kindle Fire owners can use Silk and have the choice of not using EC2. If users want more privacy, the technology will still work for them, but only at slower speeds. This means that Amazon gives the users the freedom to decide. Actually, no one can have total online privacy today. There are many products other than the Fire device that pose privacy risks. It is up to the user to decide how far he or she will let go of his or her privacy limits.
