Amazon's Silk browser: Now EFF approved. Really!
The Silk browser was only one of many revelations at Amazon's Kindle event last month, but it was a doozy. Expected to ship initially only on the Kindle Fire in November, Silk promises to learn how you browse and to predict where you're going to surf to next. That kind of stickiness with your personal data left many security experts and some lawmakers uncomfortable. But the Electronic Frontier Foundation now says it believes Amazon will provide users with the tools to disentangle themselves.
The digital privacy rights group released a report yesterday analyzing several areas of concern it had with Silk, and how Amazon allayed them. The biggest problem for the organization was whether or not the "cloud acceleration" feature could be turned off, which Amazon confirmed to the group that it can. Cloud acceleration is active by default.
There were other problem areas, including secured traffic. Jon Jenkins, Amazon's director of Silk development, told the EFF that secure web page requests via SSL and HTTPS are not routed through Amazon's servers even when cloud acceleration is running. And as the report points out, an enormous number of Web sites force secure connections, so Amazon ought to have a vested interest in Silk resolving sites quickly even without cloud acceleration.
