The US Congress might have concerns about how Amazon’s new Silk browser acceleration technology present in the Kindle Fire tablet works, but the Electronic Frountier Foundation is satisfied with the privacy design of the system.
The EFF has been asking Amazon some tough questions, and here’s what it has found:
- SSL - Amazon Silk does not intercept any SSL traffic, so no HTTPS/SSL requests will ever be sent to Amazon.
- Logging - Only three bits of information will be logged by Amazon - the URL of the resource being requested, a timestamp, and a token identifying a session - and these will be deleted after 30 days. Individual identifiers like IP and MAC addresses are not associated with browsing history, and will only be collected for troubleshooting purposes.
- No anonymization - Amazon Silk does not act like an anonymizing proxy. It does not shield your IP address from the websites you visit and does not strip out information from outgoing requests.
The EFF does how highlight a couple of remaining prvacy concerns:
- Amazon does store URL, which might contain identifying information
- Data collected by Amazon could be a target for law enforcement
However, despite these concerns, the EFF is, overall, happy with Silk.
We are generally satisfied with the privacy design of Silk, and happy that the end user has control over whether to use cloud acceleration.
That’s a pretty big thumbs-up for Silk.
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