Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled something beyond a host of new Kindle devices on Wednesday: A new mobile web browser called Silk, which will run exclusively (for now) on the new Kindle Fire.
Silk will harness Amazon’s massive cloud computing servers to handle memory-intensive browsing functionality and to learn from users’ browsing habits and predict which pages will come next, giving users a much speedier, smoother and fully tabbed browsing experience.
As Amazon’s press release on Silk notes: “Traditional browsers must wait to receive the HTML file in order to begin downloading the other page assets. Silk is different because it learns these page characteristics automatically by aggregating the results of millions of page loads…”
The Silk terms of service are even more blunt: “Like most Internet service providers and similar services that enable you to access the Web, the content of web pages you visit using Amazon Silk passes through our servers and may be cached to improve performance on subsequent page loads.”
Tests of the browser have gone over well with tech writers, who are enthusiastic about its possibilities (see the video demo from This My Next below). But Silk has also raised questions over just how much of its users’ browsing data Amazon will be storing and what it will do with said data.
“We definitely have concerns about the browser based on the reports we’re seeing,” said Rebecca Jeschke, media relations director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on digital rights, in a telephone conversation with TPM Idea Lab.
Specifically, Jeschke said that based on the initial descriptions of the Silk browser from Amazon and others in the media, it appeared as though Amazon would have more access to web browsing data than even internet service providers (ISPs), the company’s that provide the Internet connection in the first place.
Amazon’s Silk terms of service specifically state that “we generally do not keep this information for longer than 30 days,” but Jeschke wonders what the company does with the data during and after that period. TPM Idea Lab reached out to Amazon with this and other questions on Silk and will update when we receive a response.
“They key here is that Amazon appears to be keeping a record of everything you do online,” Jeschke explained, “Web surfing habits say a lot about you; what your family situation is like; what your health situation is like. It is pretty intimate information about your life. And if someone is collecting it, there’s always the chance someone going to see it, whether that’s justified or not, whether it’s accidental or on purpose.”
However, Jeschke repeatedly stressed the newness of the browser and the fact that so few people, including her group, had yet been given the opportunity to take a closer look at it. She said that her group would need more time to analyze the browser before making any specific recommendations or statements.
Meanwhile, another critique came form Apple’s longest-serving continuous employee, engineer Chris Espinosa.
In a post on his personal blog, Espinosa noted that because Silk will be storing customer web-browsing information on its cloud servers, it will have the opportunity to see everything that customers are viewing, including Amazon’s competitors in the online retail space. As Esponisa writes:
But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the privacy and data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there.
However, as numerous other writers and several of Espinosa’s commentators have pointed out, the idea to store some browsing operational data on a cloud server isn’t Amazon’s and it isn’t new: Back in 2005, Norwegian software company Opera unveiled its own mobile browser, Opera Mini, that does much the same thing by routing browser requests through a proxy server. In 2009, another smaller software company, Skyfire Labs, released a competitor proxy-based browser.
However, as Sebastian Anthony at Extreme Tech points out, the major difference is that Silk doesn’t receive encoded images of the web pages from the proxy servers, as Opera and Skyfire do, making them compatible for a smaller device. Instead, Silk actually receives the real web assets, no matter how large, because it is running primarily on Amazon’s servers.
But perhaps an even more significant difference, one that is more philosophical than technical, is that Amazon is already the world’s largest online retailer and is going head-to-head with Apple and Google in a number of other online markets, including the digital advertising space.
As Jon Stokes points out at Wired:
Amazon could use Silk as a killer mobile advertising platform, should the company choose to port the browser to other platforms. And why wouldn’t they? Kindle is already running on almost everything with a screen, and I would certainly love to try out Silk on the desktop. With Silk, Amazon could give Google a run for its money in mobile ads, and one-up Apple by succeeding in a realm where the computer maker has so far failed.
For now, though, Amazon appears to be concentrating on winning the holiday gadget-shopping season with its suite of new Kindles.
Stay tuned.
