Silk Web from Amazon

Collecting users’ personal information by websites is an old issue. It has existed for a long time, and it started off as a normal part of one’s online activity. For example, it was usual to supply your name and email address when you visited certain websites. Social networking sites would even ask users to provide even more sensitive personal information. Users freely shared this information to many web sites, without any idea of privacy implications.

As more personal data became available, targeted advertising was “invented” by online companies. They have built a user’s profile out of this accumulated data, especially regarding users’ product preferences. Without delay, privacy advocates told users to be more selective with the information that they share. Serious consumer education was done, but it was not enough to stop privacy issues and problems from getting worse.

As part of self-regulation, many websites provided their privacy policies without hiding anything. Clear options were given to users when it came to the sharing of personal information. There are companies that honestly tell their users why this information is being collected. This, however, did not stop some companies from introducing more subtle ways of gathering data.

A technology that may be new today is that of Amazon’s Silk Web Browser. This is not exactly new because Opera has used the same technology for a number of years. The Silk Web Browser is intended to be used with Amazon’s tablet, the Kindle Fire. This greatly improves the speed of internet surfing where users can experience optimized speed which is much better than their previous browsers. On its own servers, Amazon optimizes and compresses every page that users visit. This greatly increases speed and accelerates load times.

Privacy concerns again come onto the scene because of this. Obviously, Amazon can collect and store information about users’ surfing habits. Every page that they visit goes through Amazon’s servers – not one can escape. Amazon can then keep track of the kinds of sites visited, how much time users spend on them, and what they do there.

Because of privacy issues, Amazon was asked by Congress to answer some questions that they posed. Amazon initially explained that data collected will be anonymous. If users prefer not to use the feature, they can simply turn it off at anytime. This means that users will still be the ones to choose whether or not they will share their information with Amazon. If they want surfing at faster speeds, they can share the information. If they don’t mind the slower speeds, Amazon gives them the freedom to choose not to share.

Image: Tina Phillips / FreeDigitalPhotos.net