One of Amazon’s strategies to propel the new Kindle Fire past the iPad includes its new built-in browser, Silk. Silk is unique because it relies on Amazon’s robust cloud services to essentially pre-load website information for users, resulting in significantly faster browsing. Amazon’s bigger machines do the heavy lifting so their lighter devices can simply surf.
But there’s a catch.
The Silk browser will collect browsing data (Ars Technica). While preserving some level of anonymity (no personally identifiable information is recorded), Amazon will know what sites you visited, how long you stayed, etc. The value to Amazon is clear to anyone who’s ever used the “customers who bought this item also bought” feature from their main site. Being able to observe browsing even with anonymous information, is just short of mind-reading. E.g., if Amazon sees that 50% of those shopping for sleeping bags in August recently looked at the burning man site, they’re much more likely to also be interested in, say, sunscreen or yoga mats than the average outdoorsman.
Fortunately there’s an op-out setting for those who don’t want to be tracked at all. Still, this practice appears to be just part of larger trend. No matter what browser you use, your activity is probably being tracked by the browser and websites that you visit.
However, the fact that Amazon is routing requests through their own servers dovetails with our earlier post about wiretap laws and the importance of privacy in the web. There’s little difference between the practice outlined in our earlier post and this, except that Amazon is properly disclosing this in its privacy policy.
Even with all the press, and considering how few people read privacy policies, it’s still unlikely that most users are aware of this.
