Dan Auerbach writes:
Amazon recently announced that the new Kindle Fire tablet will ship with a brand new browser called Silk. The Silk browser works in “cloud acceleration” mode by routing most webpage requests through servers controlled by Amazon. The idea is to capitalize on Amazon’s powerful AWS cloud servers to parallelize and hence speed up downloading web page elements, and then pass that information back to the tablet through a persistent connection using the SPDY protocol. This protocol is generally faster than the standard HTTP protocol. This split-browser idea, not unique to Amazon, is a departure from the way major browsers work today.
Following the announcement, security experts as well as lawmakers have raised privacy questions and concerns about Silk. After all, while in cloud acceleration mode, the user is trusting Amazon with an incredible amount of information. This is because Amazon is sitting in the middle of most communications between a user’s Fire tablet on the one hand, and the website she chooses to visit on the other. This puts Amazon in a position to track a user’s browsing habits and possibly sensitive content. As there were a lot of questions that the Silk announcement left unresolved, we decided to follow up with Amazon to learn more about the privacy implications.
Our conversation with Amazon allayed many of our major concerns. Cloud acceleration mode is the default setting, but Amazon has assured us it will be easy to turn off on the first page of the browser settings menu. When turned off, Silk operates as a normal web browser, sending the requests directly to the web sites you are visiting.
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