You must have heard about the new lineup of Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) e-readers by now. At the top end of the new family is the Kindle Fire tablet, which is essentially a heavily modified branch of the Android operating system with its own trimmings. Given that much of the specifications had already been leaked out prior to the announcement however, some observers are pointing to the included Amazon Silk web browser as the most significant aspect of the announcement.

Based on WebKit, Amazon Silk can operate as a traditional browser when in "off-cloud mode." As you may expect, it's the cloud mode that is gaining the most attention at the moment. When operating in cloud mode, the Amazon Silk taps Amazon Web Services as a proxy service through which all web requests are funneled.

Amazon says this allows the company's cloud servers to heavily optimize web pages and graphics to speed up browsing substantially.

Obviously, sending all page requests to Amazon makes it possible for the company to track them. Indeed, the terms and conditions agreement of the Amazon Silk browser makes it clear that the company will retain URLs of visited pages plus the tablet's unique ID for up to 30 days.

Moreover, because the proxy service extends to encrypted web sessions, Amazon effectively gains a far better view of browsing habits than even an ISP.

In a blog post, Sophos's Chester Wisniewski warned: "If you think Google AdWords and Facebook are watching you, this service is guaranteed to have a record of EVERYTHING you do on the web." Given that, would you toggle to cloud mode of the browser when the Kindle Fire is finally available?

For more:
- check out this article at InformationWeek
- check out this article at  Daily Mail

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