Amazon Kindle Fire...opinions

[redbarron77]

Not that I'm going to go out and grab the newest techno-gadget....

But after looking at the hype around the Kindle Fire, I read a bit about their new browser, Silk:

Silk leverages the collaborative filtering techniques and machine learning algorithms Amazon has built over the last 15 years to power features such as “customers who bought this also bought…” As Silk serves up millions of page views every day, it learns more about the individual sites it renders and where users go next. By observing the aggregate traffic patterns on various web sites, it refines its heuristics, allowing for accurate predictions of the next page request. For example, Silk might observe that 85 percent of visitors to a leading news site next click on that site’s top headline. With that knowledge, EC2 and Silk together make intelligent decisions about pre-pushing content to the Kindle Fire. As a result, the next page a Kindle Fire customer is likely to visit will already be available locally in the device cache, enabling instant rendering to the screen.

This more than mildly concerns me from a privacy standpoint. This appears to me as a nice way for Amazon to directly do to us the same kind of "phishing" for our browsing habits in a direct way, that trojan viruses have done to us in the past.

Granted, most people are not concerned with the content they browse, but to voluntarily sign up for any company to review my surfing seems kind of crazy.

Am I off base and need to put away my foil hat, or should I start moving my computer to the shelter now?

[jblosser]

Ever received a targeted ad?

You're already being tracked, whether you like it or not. Your Gmail is scanned/read and ads delivered, if you've ever hit Google up for help, if you've ever browsed Amazon, basically if you've surfed, you're being tracked.

Unless you don't want to use teh intarwebz ever again, you'll have to deal with it.

Tin foil won't help.

BTW, most browsers these days already try to do some sort of prefetching - Silk is just sending a pre-rendered, compresed Arm-specific package that the processor can uncompress and show to you a lot faster than if it had to deal with Java, CSS, HTML5, etc., and pull those files from all over the Web. this is important on a tablet (or phone) because these ultra-low power processors are ultra-low power (and thus battery saving) don't have near the processing power that desktop procs do.

As an anti-tinfoil measure, your (Kindle) browsing requests will hit websites from Amazon's cloud, not your machine, effectively NAT'ing you.

Guess it boils down to whether or not you trust Amazon. If you already shop through them, then...

Edited September 29, 2011 by jblosser

[redbarron77]

That explains all the ads I get from Harbor Freight, Adam & Eve, Soldier of Fortune, and requests for money from 4H....

[jporter12]

Likwid knows about the back side of this stuff. He posted something on FB once about Google uses about 40 pieces of info to track a user, even when they're NOT logged into their Google account.

If privacy is a concern, quit using any form of electronic communications!

[jporter12]

Exact quote:

Even when you're logged out of Google... they use 57 different signals to customize your browsing... from IP address to type of computer and more

[RSparky]

i think it's kind of cool. if i'm shopping for things, then hell yah i want them to learn what i like and show me the cool stuff. hell, maybe it could even learn one's porn preferences. much more convenient than sifting through a ton of boring shit.

:bj: