Silk's Privacy ⇒

· Joanthan Poritsky

Sebastian Anthony:

With regards to privacy, because all of your web requests will go through the cloud, your surfing will effectively be fully anonymous — target websites will see Amazon’s IP addresses, not yours. If you’re worried about Amazon sniffing your data, though, you can turn off “EC2 acceleration” in the browser’s settings.

So if you want to have a fast (and I’m guessing in the case of the Kindle Fire, serviceable) browsing experience, you have to give your browsing habits over to Amazon? The plus is that then your IP address is anonymized through Amazon’s EC2.

It’s going to be interesting to see how Amazon approaches user privacy as these things roll off the presses.1


  1. I’m being a little tin-foil-hat-devil’s-advocate about this. I’m sure Amazon’s intentions are pure and I’ll bet they’ve built a cool browser that works quickly on a low-powered device. There are some privacy questions worth asking, though. ↩︎