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.

Then, targeted advertising was popularized by companies that use this collected personal information. They have accumulated so much of it that they could build profiles of users, especially when it comes to their product preferences. Immediately, privacy advocates cautioned users to be more prudent when sharing their personal data. Despite intensive consumer education, privacy issues got worse, and problems cropped up.

Sometime later, many websites presented their privacy policies without hiding anything. They gave users the option of whether or not to share their personal information. There are those websites that honestly tell their users the purpose of collecting this information. However, technology is continuously improving and more subtle ways of data gathering are being invented.

One of the latest of these technologies is Amazon’s Silk Web Browser. This is not exactly new because Opera has already been using this same technology for years. The Silk Web Browser is intended to be used with Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet. With this, users can surf the internet at optimized speed, giving them a different experience than they had with their previous browsers. On its own servers, Amazon optimizes and compresses every page that users visit, thereby increasing speed and hastening load times.

It is here where privacy concerns again come into play. Amazon can collect and store information about users’ surfing habits. This is because every page that users visit goes through Amazon’s servers. Amazon would be able to record the kinds of sites visited, how much time users spend on them, and what they do there.

The company was asked by Congress to answer the questions that they posed. On Amazon’s side, a representative said that data collected will be anonymous. In addition, users can opt to turn off this feature, if they wish. In the end, users will be the ones to decide whether or not they will share their information with Amazon. They just have to choose between either surfing at faster speeds by allowing their personal information to be collected and used for other purposes, or to not provide information and surf at slower speeds.

This is true of most countries, the United States being the most prominent. There are some places where the government censorship is running rampant and is instated unwillingly upon its citizens. These places are few and far between, but are highly publicized for their censorship and other injustices on their citizens. China is a prime example. “The Great Firewall of China” is what China’s censoring agenda is satirically known as, and its citizens are becoming fed up with it. The people of this nation used to just be defeated by it, and would never do anything to try and help themselves out of desperation, but recently, movements have been made to free them. People in the Americas and other free nations set up proxy servers to send aid to their companions in less-than-democratic nations. These anonymous proxies ensure anonymous browsing for the citizens, who run the risk of being caught for their “crimes”; YouTube, FaceBook, etc.

An anonymous proxy is a god-send for them. These servers can avoid the government censorship in place in many of these places, and allow them to get to the sites they want to. By using these servers, the citizens can also remain safe from the Internet police who roam the Internet, looking for rogue citizens. The proxy will actually conceal their identity because their IP address, which points back to them in China, will change and can be changed to one of a totally different country.

Imagine having to buy your child a computer with censoring software installed on it against your will. That is one thing, but imagine buying yourself a computer with this software on it! It would be infuriating, and would not fly in the U.S. or any other democratic nation. For people of China though, this is a reality. The newly instated Green Dam software blocks many things, and even things pertaining to anti-communism. The system is not infallible though; an anonymous proxy could easily break through the blocks.

The proxy acts as a middleman in the Internet transaction; you request the site from it, and it goes and gets it for you. This way, the fact that you visited the site is never recorded, and you can then freely surf. In fact, if anyone looked at your browsing history, all they would see is the name of the proxy server over and over and over again. While this might not matter to many Americans, if the secret Chinese police seize their computer, they would find no evidence of the innocent citizen committing the heinous crime of “broadcasting themselves.”

The bottom line is, an anonymous proxy will ensure an anonymous browsing experience for American and non-American alike. For Americans, an anonymous proxy will stop hackers from getting their IP address and tracking them. For Chinese residents and other non-free places, an anonymous proxy will get them past the privacy issues and other government censorship.