

Amazon’s Silk Browser tracks users' visited URLs - BellecQuentin
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/07/amazons-silk-browser-now-tracking-user-behavior-for-new-trending-now-section-wait-what/

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eli
EFF has previously examined silk and concluded, "We are generally satisfied
with the privacy design of Silk, and happy that the end user has control over
whether to use cloud acceleration..."

[https://www.eff.org/2011/october/amazon-
fire%E2%80%99s-new-b...](https://www.eff.org/2011/october/amazon-
fire%E2%80%99s-new-browser-puts-spotlight-privacy-trade-offs)

I don't think showing sites that are trending in aggregate changes anything.
This seems like a nonstory.

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chimeracoder
Also, it's possible the concept of 'trending now' may not impact user privacy
- the whole point of Silk is that pages are partly pre-rendered on Amazon's
servers, so it could be implemented as simply as seeing which parts of the
cache are being hit frequently.

I don't really know much about how Silk is actually implemented, but it seems
like all we know so far is that they're doing at least as much tracking as
your ISP already is (and frankly, I find that much more concerning).

~~~
RexRollman
Agreed, and if I recall correct, you can turn that feature off and call
websites directly.

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indygreg2
Chrome's sync (i.e. sign in to Chrome) uploads the cleartext of your full
browsing history to Google by default:
[http://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2012/04/08/comparing-the-
securi...](http://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2012/04/08/comparing-the-security-and-
privacy-of-browser-syncing/)

From a privacy perspective Chrome and Silk sound the same.

Now, maybe Amazon is more actively using that data and doesn't provide means
to change privacy settings (Chrome allows you to locally encrypt). I dunno.

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sp332
At least you're not signed in by default like you are on the Kindle.

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selectout
The real key to look at here is whether or not they are associating your
visited URLs with your amazon account (or whatever account you need to be
logged into. not a Kindle owner).

They mention they don't collect PII which doesn't mean it isn't being
associated to PII though.

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Steko
As long as the data is anonymized and aggregated properly and links with less
then thousands of hits are never shown then there shouldn't be any problem.

One other interesting thing they could do with the data is if they started
Amazon Search (they're caching a lot of the web as is) they could use their
tracking of Google results to goose Amazon Search the way Bing did with IE
tracking data.

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luser001
Does Silk also kick in for SSL websites (the previous version did, iirc)?

I hope they had the decency to disable it for SSL connections.

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sswezey
I don't think you understand Silk entirely, it's a web browser - it doesn't
'kick in,' it's how you connect to any web site.

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luser001
Just trying to be succinct: what I meant is the "render on the server"
concept, which the thing that differentiates Silk from every other browser.

~~~
alexchamberlain
Does it really render on the server? Doesn't it just proxy over SPDY?

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talmand
So I guess this will be brought up every time a new Kindle tablet is
announced. I suppose it's useful for those who haven't heard this before.

