
Chris Espinosa: Fire - siglesias
http://cdespinosa.posterous.com/fire
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huhtenberg
One could argue that Opera Mini has been doing the very same thing for a while
now, and it did not appear to cause any major uproar between the privacy
proponents. This might be a typical "Ah, that's Opera, cool stuff, but who
cares" attitude, but it might also indicate a profound shift in surfer's
attitude towards their privacy. You press them long enough and they will grow
to accept that intrusive Web surfing is a damn norm.

That's the shift I am personally _really_ afraid of, but by the looks of it
and as upsetting as it sounds, it is inevitable.

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falcolas
I believe Opera is not generating any uproar simply because they are acting as
a "dumb pipe" in the truest sense - they're not trying to mess with the stream
of data that they're entrusted (even though they're in a best possible
position to do so), and so we trust them with the stream of data.

I think it would be different if they were intruding on the stream, and I
imagine the backlash against Amazon if they do will be major.

~~~
huhtenberg
But the thing is that Opera now sits on a trove of highly valuable
information, and I can't imagine them not doing anything about it. As benign
and non-evil as they are, they must feel pressure - be it internal, external
or both - to capitalize on this "asset". Do you trust them enough to keep
resisting this pressure, which is only guaranteed to rise?

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rhizome
All we know is that they've resisted it so far, right? I know the bar for
ethics here is pretty low, but give credit where due.

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jcampbell1
> This is the first shot in the new war for replacing the Internet with a
> privatized merchant data-aggregation network.

Doesn't this already exist? Google has the information from toolbar data.
DoubleClick has already classified everyone on the internet based on their
interests based on what sites they visit. How much better are Amazon's product
recommendations going to get based on this new source of data? My guess is
some, but not much.

A cheap tablet with a fast browser will bring new people into the Amazon
ecosystem, and that will be worth far more than the clickstream data.

~~~
nupark2
_Doesn't this already exist? Google has the information from toolbar data._

... and if instead, Google built reporting of visited sites _and all their
contents, cookies, and your personal information_ into Chrome?

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eli
I don't know why this keeps coming up. It would violate their privacy policy
to do anything like that, they've said they're not going to do anything like
that, and if they _did_ do something like that it would be easily detected and
there would be a massive, unrecoverable backlash.

If you want to play conspiracy theory, why don't you ponder what percentage of
sites have Google Analytics or +1 javascript installed?

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cturner
I think you've misread the parent. nupark2 is distinguishing between what
Amazon is planning and what Google do. jcampbell is saying "doesn't this
already exist" and nupark2 is saying no.

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altuzar
Opera Mini's been doing this for more than a year. And Opera Mini is one of
the main browsers on Android phones.

Works fine with Opera for iPad. Better than Safari imho.

~~~
jerf
Opera doesn't have the other concerns raised here. They aren't vendors of
anything else themselves, and have no particular reason to use their data to
further other goals they may have.

The question of whether this technically "works" is uninteresting. The answer
is yes.

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rapind
Opera inserts ads via this proxy. They bought AdMarvel last year. I'd say
that's a good reason to check out your data.

<http://www.admarvel.com/OMAE.html>

~~~
jerf
Oh dear. I'm surprised someone hasn't had a major-league lawyers-involved
hissy fit about this. Thanks for the info!

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masnick
I doubt end users will care as long as the TOS aren't absurd (e.g. Amazon has
the right to sell your non-anonymized data probably wouldn't fly). People
_will_ care that their Silk browser is screaming fast, though.

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powertower
ISPs have been doing this for ages, maybe not as fine grained as what Amazon
plans, but all traffic in general is data-mined and sold.

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larrik
Is this true? If it is, why don't the RIAA and MPAA just buy the information
they seem so desperate to get so they can sue you with it?

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madiator
What about pageviews: If Amazon stores one copy of NYTimes and serves it to
1000 users, will NYTimes record it as a single hit?

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ConstantineXVI
Theoretically, Amazon could "replay" the 1000 hits back to the NYT in the
background while the users are getting served the cached page. In addition, it
appears that JavaScript still runs on the client (though compiled down to
bytecode before reaching the device), so any JS-based analytics would still
get fired off.

~~~
xtacy
And Amazon could also do filter out any malware distributing websites.

Would it be wrong to call the Fire some sort of thin client? (just for the
browser)

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madiator
Think about this: So Amazon can learn about people's browsing habits and can
infer a user's interests. Now, based on this, it can put ads in the
screensaver (say with "$20 off on the Kindle fire if you let us do this"). An
extreme case would be to modify the webpage with their own ads (hopefully will
not happen and is unethical). But nevertheless good move, Amazon.

~~~
drats
I think their IPs will start getting blocked if they substitute ads. However,
the Kindle ads would work wonders. Just inferring the main categories in which
the user makes purchases from their Amazon history and showing the top five
best sellers in those categories would be sufficient, but having the web
history is huge. That said, the potential abuses are also massive if they
start getting hit by warrants/national security letters.

~~~
madiator
Or they could start a SilkAds service like AdWords/AdSense so content
providers can display ads using Amazon.

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patrickaljord
Android Apache's license allows just that. Google was aware that was going to
happen. There have already been android phones released that were locked on
Bing as the search engine and many other devices with no android market. So
nothing unexpected here for google.

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dabeeeenster
Sensationalist.

~~~
bprater
Is it? Sounds like a strong privacy argument to me. Especially if Silk doesn't
offer an opt-out. There will be wayyy too much useful data in Amazon's lap for
them to simply ignore it.

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joezydeco
Is there a point where even "anonymized" data can be mined and recombined into
something that is used to personalize and sell things better?

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angelbob
Absolutely. Even if you only know what people are doing/buying in aggregate,
that's still very valuable. And you can still correlate between various
anonymized streams of data if you know how they correlate -- i.e. 32-year-old
male manga fans are more likely to buy Pokemon and Pocky than average.

Amazon already gets (and uses, vigorously) a lot of this kind of data from
Amazon.com, but I'll bet they're salivating at the idea of getting to cross-
compare against all the non-Amazon.com data on the same topics. If they're
not, they should be.

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naner
Speaking of caching, are browsers already doing all the caching that is
practical on modern machines? I vaguely remember years ago downloading a
special program that sped up the internet by performing more aggressive
caching than the browser was capable of (basically it was just a caching
proxy). Everything was noticeably quicker.

Though these days things probably feel slower because every website is loaded
down with 3rd party JS from 100 different sites...

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eli
Just a guess, but that program might have had more to do with adjusting
Windows' TCP/IP settings, which used some very antiquated defaults until
rather recently.

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rshm
Apart from the technology provider, amazon is a giant e-commerce outlet. The
implications - Amazon knowing what sells, can be misused to foster its growth
on e-commerce. And such things are not even related to user's privacy at all.

User might benefit for a short while, by getting their products under the same
roof. But in long run it only serves to create e-commerce monopoly and drive
mom-pop/small businesses out of the market, in turn eliminating the
competition.

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gregable
Isn't this the same data stream that Microsoft is grabbing via most IE users?

It's a big privacy violation, but not a major advantage for amazon.

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dvdhsu
What is stopping you from installing another browser on the Fire? Wouldn't
that entirely bypass Silk?

~~~
patrickaljord
Silk has an option to turn off the cloud proxy browsing mode.

