Amid security concerns, Amazon’s new Silk browser could be coming to Mac and Windows
[Via MacDailyNews]
“Along with its new Kindle Fire tablet, Amazon unveiled its brand new web browser called Silk,” Steve Kovach reports for The Business Insider.
“Right now, Silk will only run on the Fire, but Amazon has already registered several domains hinting that the browser could come to other platforms, according to domain registration watchdog Fusible,” Kovach reports. “Within the list of about 500 domains Amazon registered yesterday to defend the Fire and Silk brands, Fusible found amazonsilkformac.com, amazonsilkforpc.com, and amazonsilkforandroid.com.”
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Even secure https links may be accessible. As the article states, all Amazon servers are in the US. It would thus be legal and simple for the US government to subpoena the information stored on the Amazon servers, even if the requesting device is in another country.
Sorry, it is bad enough that Amazon can get my browser history if it chose. But making it easier for the US government.
How about this? If you go to a free porn site, all the bits and pieces of the page go through many, many different servers. That is how the Internet works. While probably not impossible, it would take a lot of subpoenas and work to piece them all together.
If you use the Silk browser, a lot of that data goes right through the Amazon servers, making it very trivial to reconstruct by anyone,including the government.
Bye-bye porn sites. No more anonymity of browsing. Amazon – and thus the government – would know exactly where you have been.
So, Amazon makes out like bandits by using our browsing history for its marketing/ads and the government can easily get info on anyone using Silk.
Not the sort of world I’d like to live in.
It also means that any commercial enterprise that uses Silk essentially gives that information to Amazon. What sort of competitive advantage would they gain by being able to examine browsing behavior that comes from Google devices? How much money could Amazon make selling that info to Apple?
Any company should simply ban the use of Silk because I think this is a fundamental problem. We have only Amazon’s word that this information will be used in certain ways.
I’m not convinced. all it takes is one idiot – Sure, amazon could apologize but the damage is done. And is Amazon really going to go against a government subpoena, assuming that is even required? Maybe Amazon will simply turn it over if asked nicely.
