Amid all the excitement around the announcement of Amazon’s Silk browser (which launched with the Kindle Fire) – one important angle has been largely ignored: your privacy. Why? The Silk browser is different from any other previous browser in that you connect to web pages through Amazon’s servers (on their EC2 system). This “cloud-based” browsing setup allows most of the heavy processing to happen on Amazon’s servers, and not on your device. So for relatively processor-weak tablets, this can make web pages download and render far faster than existing client-only browsers.

Why is this significant? Well, with a normal browser, when you view a webpage, the page goes straight from the website’s server through the public internet, then through your ISP, then to your computer. No where along the way is there a single “gateway” that all of your browsing information passes through (unless you’re using a proxy of some sort, in which case you probably have different privacy concerns). When you use Amazon Silk, however, *all* off your browsing data passes through Amazon’s servers. They can see everything you do, every web page you visit. This of course excepts secure (https) websites, but generally your browsing data is available for Amazon to see and analyze.

I think most of us understand the risks of having one company being able to see some of your browsing information, namely what you do on their website, or even within their network of sites. Most of us, however might think twice before letting a single company view *all* of our browsing data.

Something to think about when considering using the Silk browser from Amazon. Indeed it is a very impressive piece of technology and a great user experience, but how comfortable are you with showing off where you browse to Mr. Bezos?