Concerns over Amazon Kindle Fire web tracking

The upcoming Kindle Fire tablet has sparked a high level of interest, since it was introduced by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos earlier this week. Reports however have pointed out that they may implement a tracking system to monitor user's browsing habits.

The new browser called ‘Amazon Silk' will use the company servers to pre load web pages before they are delivered to the user device. According to Bezos the ‘split browser' approach will help speed up the browsing experience. It also helps reduce the demand placed on the Kindle fire central processing unit which will help counter act the low hardware specifications of the device.

The downside to this implementation is that Amazon's servers will have to keep a record of user browsing patterns to help the preemptive system to pre load new data. Obviously concerns are being made that they could easily use this data for advertising and promotional reasons.

Chester Wisniewski, from security group Sophos said “All of your web surfing habits will transit Amazon's cloud, f you think that Google AdWords and Facebook are watching you, this service is guaranteed to have a record of everything you do on the web.”

Opera Mini uses a similar system for preloading data to a user's smartphone to help improve performance, but Opera do not keep records of the web pages their users visit.

According to the terms and conditions for Amazon Silk, they claim that the information will ‘generally not be kept for longer than 30 days.”

Kitguru says: Is all tracking bad?

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