EFF Gives Thumbs Up to Amazon's Silk Web Browser

Posted 10/23/2011 at 5:57am | by Pulkit Chandna

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Even as all other Android tablets seem hopelessly incapable of holding a candle to the Apple iPad, Amazon’s upcoming Kindle Fire can already be seen glaring rather invitingly (or ominously if you’re Apple) in the distance. Its initial dazzle is perhaps largely due to its highly affordable price and cloud-accelerated Silk browser. While its hard to look beyond its unbelievably low price, certain folks are much more interested in the latter.

Unlike normal browsers, the Silk browser will actively tap into Amazon’s powerful AWS servers to deliver a speedier browsing experience to the user. Given the novelty of this approach, it’s no surprise that the Silk browser is drawing a lot of interest. Likewise, it’s even less surprising that a lot of people are only interested due to obvious concerns attached with the whole idea of Amazon routing huge amounts of web traffic through its servers. In fact, even some Congressmen have expressed concerns.

However, in what is a huge vote of confidence in Amazon’s favor, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has said that most of its data privacy concerns with the Silk browser have now been laid to rest. Actually, the non-profit digital rights group had approached Amazon with its concerns and sought answers. As it turns out, the e-tailer managed to allay most, if not all, of the EFF’s misgivings.

“Cloud acceleration mode is the default setting, but Amazon has assured us it will be easy to turn off on the first page of the browser settings menu,” reads EFF’s statement. “When turned off, Silk operates as a normal web browser, sending the requests directly to the web sites you are visiting. “

Further, the EFF was told that the browser does not use cloud-acceleration for encrypted traffic, meaning secure web page requests (SSL) aren’t routed through Amazon’s servers whatsoever. Amazon also assured the EFF that it only logs the URL, timestamp and token identifying the browsing session.

“We repeatedly asked if there was any way to associate the logged information with a particular user or Amazon account, and we were told that there was not, and that Amazon is not in a position to track users.”

All said, the EFF still has a few lingering concerns: “First of all, Amazon stores URLs you visit, and these sometimes contain identifying information. To pick a prominent example, there is an opportunity to identify people through their search history with some degree of accuracy. Indeed, given the common practice employed by search engines of putting query terms in the URL as parameters, Amazon will effectively have a database of user search histories across many different search engines.”