By John Moe
Lost in all the hullabaloo about the $199 price tag on the new Amazon Kindle Fire tablet is the fact that the Fire uses a very different way to connect to the web. The way it does that is raising some privacy concerns.
Along with the Fire tablet, Amazon introduced the Silk browser this week. Whereas most browsers allow your computer to connect to the server of a website, Silk routes everything through Amazon's networks. Once your request is there, Amazon can rely on cached versions of that site that it serves up faster than if you had to wait for another server somewhere else. The difference will be usually measured in fractions of seconds but still, we all want faster speeds online. [...]By providing a fast connection to the site you want, Silk will be trying to figure out what you want next. They're going to collect all this data on other users' behavior as well as your behavior and use that to predict what is the next page that you're going to want to click on. Then they will cache that page or get it ready for you so they can quickly load it to your mobile device.
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An Amazon spokesperson told us that the data used to determine these predictions will be gathered and then aggregated and anonymized. Your name won't be attached to it. Still, you're letting Amazon be a middle man in your communications. Chester Wisniewski from the security firm Sophos says, "All of your communications will be sent through Amazon's computers. That means that they will be logging basically every website that you visit and would have ability to look inside of that traffic."
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You can erase your browsing history on YOUR computer. You can't erase Amazon's computer. But again: Silk is fast. And now, says Bai-Ling Yin, you've gotta do some soul searching."For someone not concerned about privacy, this is great. Your custom browser is going to be optimized to be super fast, however for those who are more concerned, this is a little scary actually."
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