Kindle Fire Ignites Security Concerns

With Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet shipping today, many consumers are talking about the tablet's hyped features and low price tag. While I'm sure that the Fire will bomb the market as a low cost iPad alternative, and e-reader on steroids, what's far more interesting to me are the many security and privacy concerns integral to the tablet's new Silk web browser.

In the words of Steve Vaughan-Nichols over at ZDNet "Silk looks to be very fast and about as private as a bathroom stall without a door."


The increased speed and functionality of the Silk browser comes via computing magic that involves dynamic interfacing between a Fire user's browser and Amazon's web cloud. In terms that a novice geek like myself can understand, the Fire optimizes performance is by connecting to a proxy of a viewed website, not the site itself, enhancing speed and delivery of content. All that Amazon does to gain these nanoseconds of performance is to keep a full log for 30 days of every user's complete web history and track their online moves.

Given that Amazon is a US company, these full logs are available to anyone with a court order or (under the Patriot Act) an investigator with a "terror" gripe. In addition to this, the sheer targeted marketing power of one of the world's biggest retailers now has full access to your online life, habits, virtues, vices. Trust me, you're being sold a way of buying, not a product. If I can coin the term "voluntary consumer surveillance," I'd like to.

In personal conversations about privacy, I've often heard people say "I don't care, let them watch me. I have nothing to hide." This is not the point.

Privacy rights affect us all, and the most insidious infringements of our privacy are the voluntary ones. Though our digital age carries with it an inherent window into our personal lives, we must be thoughtful - deeply thoughtful - about the rights that we hand over along with our hard earned cash.

Amazon's true profits will likely not come from the $199 that a Fire purchaser shells out. Rather, they will have access to the most powerful marketing tool in the history of the internet. In their defense, the cloud connectivity can be shut off by a user. However, given that such a mode is not the default of the device, most users will likely not know or understand the implications of leaving it on.

People live their lives on the internet today, for better or worse. It is products like the Kindle Fire that should highlight the difficult dilemmas for privacy that such a lifestyle includes.

For a balancing opinion, read Cory Doctorow's summary of EFF's security evaluation of the Fire.