Amazon’s Fire Phone Is Here – But Does Your Privacy Go Out The Window With It?

Amazon Fire Phone

The smartphone battleground has just expanded beyond Google and Apple to include the one contender that understandably can fight alongside these two giants – Amazon. One of the keys to success for a smartphone is making it very attractive for developers which is one thing that Blackberry really failed at, remember Blackberry?

Amazon did a great job abstracting the Fire Phone’s bells and whistles into accessible libraries for developers, said Cotter. That’s enabled Cotter, a former general manager for Amazon, to bring some of the Fire Phone’s whiz-bang 3D features into the Squarehub app, a private social network for families and their kids. (Source – VentureBeat)

Sounds cool right? Without a doubt Amazon has to play catch-up, and quickly, and it looks like they have made it incredibly easy for developers to move existing apps onto the new platform. Here’s the catch…

“All of your web surfing habits will transit Amazon’s cloud,” he writes on Sophos’ Naked Security blog. “If you think that Google AdWords and Facebook are watching you, this service is guaranteed to have a record of 

everything

 you do on the Web.” (Source – CNN.com)

Wait, what? All web surfing habits will transit to Amazon’s cloud?!?!

“What this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users,” Chris Espinosa, one of the first Apple employees, wrote on his personal blog. “Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. (Source – CNN.com)

So, um, yeah, that’s a little scary but as a data geek I have to say, “How awesome is that?”. If Amazon can pull this off they will have more data about how people do things online than any other company on the planet, and that is absolutely going to give them an edge over Google and Apple…as long as consumers go along with the plan.

Here’s the question, are you ready to share with Amazon every single thing you do when you’re surfing the web?

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton