One could argue that Opera Mini has been doing the very same thing for a while now, and it did not appear to cause any major uproar between the privacy proponents. This might be a typical "Ah, that's Opera, cool stuff, but who cares" attitude, but it might also indicate a profound shift in surfer's attitude towards their privacy. You press them long enough and they will grow to accept that intrusive Web surfing is a damn norm.<p>That's the shift I am personally <i>really</i> afraid of, but by the looks of it and as upsetting as it sounds, it is inevitable.
> This is the first shot in the new war for replacing the Internet with a privatized merchant data-aggregation network.<p>Doesn't this already exist? Google has the information from toolbar data. DoubleClick has already classified everyone on the internet based on their interests based on what sites they visit. How much better are Amazon's product recommendations going to get based on this new source of data? My guess is some, but not much.<p>A cheap tablet with a fast browser will bring new people into the Amazon ecosystem, and that will be worth far more than the clickstream data.
Opera Mini's been doing this for more than a year. And Opera Mini is one of the main browsers on Android phones.<p>Works fine with Opera for iPad. Better than Safari imho.
I doubt end users will care as long as the TOS aren't absurd (e.g. Amazon has the right to sell your non-anonymized data probably wouldn't fly). People _will_ care that their Silk browser is screaming fast, though.
Think about this: So Amazon can learn about people's browsing habits and can infer a user's interests. Now, based on this, it can put ads in the screensaver (say with "$20 off on the Kindle fire if you let us do this"). An extreme case would be to modify the webpage with their own ads (hopefully will not happen and is unethical). But nevertheless good move, Amazon.
Android Apache's license allows just that. Google was aware that was going to happen. There have already been android phones released that were locked on Bing as the search engine and many other devices with no android market. So nothing unexpected here for google.
Speaking of caching, are browsers already doing all the caching that is practical on modern machines? I vaguely remember years ago downloading a special program that sped up the internet by performing more aggressive caching than the browser was capable of (basically it was just a caching proxy). Everything was noticeably quicker.<p>Though these days things probably feel slower because every website is loaded down with 3rd party JS from 100 different sites...
Apart from the technology provider, amazon is a giant e-commerce outlet. The implications - Amazon knowing what sells, can be misused to foster its growth on e-commerce. And such things are not even related to user's privacy at all.<p>User might benefit for a short while, by getting their products under the same roof. But in long run it only serves to create e-commerce monopoly and drive mom-pop/small businesses out of the market, in turn eliminating the competition.