Amazon Kindle Fire Keeps Track of You!
Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablet will feature new web browser, Amazon Silk, which claims to have speeds up to 20 times faster through the company’s “cloud” servers.
However, there is speculation that this new process being used by Amazon to “speed things up” breaches privacy rules and tracks the users’ every movement on the web.
Rather than directing traffic from the Kindle Fire to a Web page, transmissions will first connect to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
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Amazon’s product description for the Kindle Fire says, "When you use Silk, without thinking about it or doing anything explicit, you're calling on the computing speed and power of the Amazon Web Services cloud."
The Kindle Fire promises to increase battery life and speed up web connections by accessing cloud.
However Chester Wisniewski of British security company Sophos’s, wrote in a blog, “If you think Google AdWords and Facebook are watching you, this service is guaranteed to have a record of EVERYTHING you do on the web. All web connections from your tablet will connect directly to Amazon, rather than the destination web page.”
He added: “Hopefully you can start to see the problem here. All of your web surfing habits will transit Amazon's cloud.”
Under the terms and conditions of Amazon’s new browser, Amazon is entitled to keep the unique ID of the tablet, and URLs of pages visited for up to 30 days.
"While most of us roll our eyes when confronted with long privacy policies and pages of legalese, privacy risks lurk around every corner," Wisniewski wrote. "If you buy a Fire device, think carefully as to whether your privacy is worth trading for a few milliseconds faster Web surfing experience."
“The concept is to use the power of Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud to retrieve web pages and pre-render any objects (or reduce their size) in a way that lowers the burden placed on the tablet,” wrote Wisniewski.
A senior employee at Apple has also spoken of this by writing, “But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the privacy and data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here.”
Amazon will also allow users to use its Silk browser without transmitting data through the cloud. However, the connection speeds will not be as fast.
