Amazon weaving Silk based on your digital footprint
The Kindle Fire has a new-cloud Internet browser, Silk, and it has raised some new questions with regards to privacy.
It appears that all of your web surfing habits will transit Amazon’s cloud… just like Google AdWords and Facebook who are also recording/ watching you.
However, Amazon Silk functions in a new way which is unlike anything else currently on the market. Ordinarily, most web browsers such as Safari, Explorer and Firefox connect internet users directly with websites, but Silk filters everything through Amazon’s own cloud-computing services. The company argue that this enables the mobile web experience to be carried out at almost double the speed at which websites currently load.
The privacy brigade say there may be other unintended consequences, stating that the web tracking also applies to secure connections, meaning in theory that Amazon could keep a log of communications made during other online transactions and even on secure versions of sites like Facebook, Twitter and Gmail. Amazon has responded saying that “Silk keeps a temporarily log of Web addresses known as uniform resource locators (‘URLs’) for the Web pages it serves and certain identifiers, such as IP or MAC addresses, to troubleshoot and diagnose Amazon Silk technical issues. We generally do not keep this information for longer than 30 days”.