Amazon's Silk browser raises privacy concerns

Internet browser designed for its Kindle Fire tablet device, a development that comes as regulators increasingly zero in on the privacy aspects of new Web innovations, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The Silk browser is designed to route users of the new tablet accessing the Internet through Amazon's own cloud-computing servers, in order to shorten the time needed to load Web sites.

Silk is a 'split browser' that partially lives on the Fire tablet, and partially lives in the cloud, producing a faster browsing experience, PCMag says. Basically, most of the heavy lifting is handled by Amazon's EC2 and C3 services. As PCMag's ExtremeTech described it: "Amazon sucks down the target Web site, lays it out, renders it - and then ships it off as a much smaller, condensed package to the Kindle Fire tablet."

Now Congress is getting involved, and this has already turned into a bipartisan issue, ZDNet states. Ed Markey (D-MA) penned and issued a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos explicitly detailing his concerns with Silk.

Among the congressman's questions: What information is Amazon planning to collect? Does it plan to sell, rent or otherwise make available this customer information to outside companies? How will it convey its privacy policy to users? Will customers be asked to opt-in to having their browsing tracked, or will they have to opt out? The New York Times says.

Users can also turn off the cloud side of the Fire's browser, although the device presumably would then suffer some slowdown - defeating at least part of the point of having the tablet in the first place.