Amazon has a new eReader/tablet out called the Fire.

And judging from pre-sales order, this is one hot item.

As a reader, I’m delighted that the collapse of civilization has been averted by a new generation of readers.  On the other hand, the sneaky, underhanded methods that Amazon is using to erode privacy in the name of “faster web browsing convenience” is appaling.

British Telecom (BT) experienced lawsuits and suffered market cap loss when they introduced a similar technology in the UK a few years ago and called it PHORM.  A few years later, the same ideas and re-released by Amazon and other then a few privacy activitsits, no one seems to care.

Folks, this is BIG.  Cloud-enhanced browsers, especially by major intermediaries like Amazon, Apple/iTunes, Google or Facebook are major, long-term threats.

Here’s a more in-depth article and video from Techi.

Amazon Silk is just another invasion of privacy

Oct 1 by JD Rucker

Amazon Silk

Amazon is getting a lot of attention based upon the Amazon Fire tablet, but now that buzz around the initial launch announcement has subsided a bit, it’s time to take a look at real differentiator: Silk.

When Amazon first introduced Silk, they didn’t wait passed the 2nd sentence of the post before asking the question that they knew would be asked by dozens of tech bloggers: “A browser? Do we really need another one?”

Their response to those and other questions is in this video:

What they didn’t address was the inherent problem with their browser: privacy. To solve the concern that tablet hardware is underpowered, Amazon wants to do much of the heavy lifting from the cloud. To do this, they will be learning about us; our ongoing web activity must be accumulated and analyzed to give Silk the ability to anticipate our next clicks and prepare to serve pages that we click on regularly as well as pages that they think we’re going to click on shortly.

This should give us pause.

via Amazon Silk is just another invasion of privacy | Techi.com.