Amazon Silk Doesn't Intercept SSL Traffic, Tracks Sessions Not Users

Amazon's innovative Silk browser, exclusive to the Kindle Fire tablet, is built on a pretty impressive technology, but this technology also poses some privacy concerns that some have been quick to raise, despite the device and browser not being available yet.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been able to get more details from Amazon regarding what info the company will store on each user and how the 'cloud acceleration' in Amazon Silk will work.

The info provided suggests that Silk should be as private as possible while using the cloud technology.

Right of the bat, Amazon ensures users that 'cloud acceleration' ca be disabled and easily, something that it has said ever since it unveiled the browser.

One big question answered is whether encrypted SSL traffic is passed through the Amazon cloud or not. Amazon has said that all encrypted traffic is between the browser and the website alone, nothing is directed via Amazon's cloud.

This should provide some piece of mind for those minding their online security, but it also means that Amazon Silk should be perfectly capable of functioning as a browser without the Amazon cloud.

This is important since 'cloud acceleration' can be disabled if the user wants to, but that would be pretty useless if Silk worked significantly poorer in 'offline' mode.

Amazon also provided some details on what user info is stored in the cloud. It says that the only info recorded is the URL of every page or resource used, a timestamp for it and a session identifier.

All of the data will be linked to a browsing session, but not to an individual user or device. This should mean that Amazon has no way to know whether two separate sessions come from the same device or from two people across the country.

This data is stored for 30 days, but things like IP or MAC addresses are not recorded anywhere, except for troubleshooting purposes.

Amazon collects URL data since it uses to predict what pages users will load next on any given website and also to know what pages to keep cashed in the cloud to provide faster access to users.

Overall, it seems that Amazon has taken the necessary steps to ensure user privacy. However, the fact remains that it still holds a vast amount of data which may still contain identifiable or personal info, search engine queries for example.