Amazon Silk’s fast new web: Is it safe and should you use it?

It’s always the web page with directions and a map that you’re trying to load when you rush out the door that takes the longest to load. The rush to add rich media, mashups of related information, and an increasing number of fancy ads to web sites have combined to make them more ama ing but also more ponderous than ever. Some popular pages require nearly a hundred different pieces from over a do en sites to load fully. Ama on Silk, the browser that debuts with the Kindle Fire, has been designed to fix all that.

Ama on Silk pulls all the individual components of a web page — images, audio, and video files for starters — into the Ama on cloud (EC2) and caches them for quick retrieval from the Silk client. This greatly improves the interactive performance of web pages for those using their new browser. This speed up is particularly important on mobile devices which are often connected through slower networks and whose slower processors make page loads take longer than on a desktop at the best of times.

The ESPN home page includes over 5MB of data from do ens of different resources

Perhaps most innovative is Silk’s ability to analy e frequent sequences of pages and pre-fetch pages it thinks will be needed next. Ama on uses the example of pre-fetching the Business page of the New York Times when someone retrieves the front page. Google Instant and Instant Pages have already pioneered the idea of pre-fetching likely search results. Unlike Google Instant though, Silk’s pre-fetch will learn from users and start to work on any common pattern of page navigation without requiring any website customi aton.

Will Silk erase your privacy?

That’s where the risk comes in. To work across all websites, Ama on needs to track your every click and analy e it. The Silk Terms & Conditions are clear on this. Ama on is also clear in claiming that it doesn’t intend to use the information to track you online but it will still exist in their databases, subject to future uses, government subpoena, or even being hacked. Instantly speculation has started that Ama on will use this information to get you tobuy more stuff.

Another side effect of using Silk’s accelerator is that in addition to all your clicks, all the information you send and receive from Silk goes through the Ama on servers, raising obvious privacy concerns. So is it worth using the Silk “EC2″ accelerator and sufferiing a loss of privacy? For casual browsing of the sorts of sites you might share on Facebook, the acceleration will be a great help. But for anything you never want to see on the frontpage of a newspaper, it’s certainly safer to go into Silk’s options and turn off EC2 acceleration. Ideally Silk will offer a way to do that on a site by site basis as an option.

If you want to take advantage of the acceleration and not lose your privacy, one tip is to use a secure protocol like HTTPS or a VPN to access any sites you’re worried about. Gmail uses HTTPS by default so your interactions with it are secure and you can change your Facebook settings to access it using HTTPS — probably a good idea in any case.

It’s important to keep in perspective that these risks aren’t new. RIM’s BlackBerry and Opera Mini have been doing server-side caching and compression for years, but RIM’s solid enterprise reputation and Opera’s below-the-radar profile have kept the issue out of the public eye. Google is also building larger and larger databases of our interactions as it enhances its search and sharing services, and Facebook, as we well know, is fast shaping up to be a complete repository of our every need, want, and whimsy.

Ama on Silk’s fast new web: Is it safe and should you use it?