Amazon Silk Browser Tracks Everything You Do

There has been a lot of feedback in the online community and even an article on CNN about how the Silk browser in Amazon’s new Fire tablet filters all content you visit through their cloud.  This increases the load times of sites by up to 200% but also means Amazon tracks everything you visit and every transaction you perform that isn’t encrypted.

People who are up in arms over the Facebook tracking cookies that track where users visit even when leaving Facebook supposedly, or Google’s pattern and habit tracking of Chrome would probably see this as an even larger threat to user’s anonymity in where they go and what they visit online.

It is common knowledge now that your “habits” and “patterns” are what advertisers want.  This personalization of what you buy, where you visit helps better tailor advertisements, coupons and enticing offers for the products or services you are more likely to be interested in.

Corporations themselves want to collect this data to gleam more revenue from advertisers to sell this data or in the case of Amazon align their own product / service offerings to better align with users patterns of behavior.

But how do consumers and users feel about all their browsing patterns being tracked with such detail for such purposes?  It should be no surprise that the majority of web surfers do not like the tracking, but far fewer are willing to make the changes in browsers or option configuration to actually disable the tracking or go around it.

The inconvenience of running Chrome in Incognito Mode all the time outweighs the pros of having virtually none of your cookies, set and data listed.

Using a site like Kroxy or VPN service to pass all your traffic through so websites don’t know where you are coming from is also an inconvenience most are not willing to do.

So, how upset are you if your tablet browser which is from Amazon and is all about making everything Amazon more accessible and within reach also tracks all your browsing information? 

Do you think this will deter users from buying the Fire as a tablet device?

-Justin Germino