We blogged about the privacy concerns around the Kindle’s new Silk browser not long ago. Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has done a more thorough review of the Kindle Fire’s Silk browser and has concluded that there are some privacy pros and cons that weren’t obvious before.
The unexpected good news is that there are privacy benefits for users who choose to allow Silk to connect to Amazon’s servers. All data sent to and from Amazon is encrypted to some degree, which means that users connecting over an unsecured network (increasingly common in public places) can’t be spied on as easily by other users on that network.
Yet, even with the default setting to allow Silk to route requests to Amazon on, no secured information will be sent (e.g., sites starting with https://). These requests bypass their servers and are handled as if you had opted to use the Silk as an ordinary browser.
The expected not-so-good news is that Amazon will still log URLs associated with a given browsing session. This doesn’t include personally identifiable information, unless you provide it yourself unintentionally. Ever notice how often websites plug your searches into the URL? Do a search from Youtube’s search bar and look in your address bar. Amazon would have a record of that if it were done through Silk on their servers. If this doesn’t sound like a big deal, read about the time AOL released “anonymous” search data (also linked within the EFF article).
I’ll leave you to read the EFF’s full post for more details.
