[dba-Tech] FW: Amazon Kindle Fire spies on your internet traffic

John,

While it is true for any cell phone carrier to log what you do, this is no different than with your ISP, which you are using to send this email with. What makes what Amazon is doing very unusual is that the are going to be putting themselves as a man in the middle between even secure HTTPS communication, meaning that you will no longer be able to trust the security of that protocol anymore. Amazon is breaking the chain of trust that allows you to do online banking, for instance, without the fear that your banking details can be leaked.

I think using this sort of proxy by default (meaning that 99% of consumers will not disable it since they don't know any better) is questionable in of itself, but it wouldn't be so bad if they only applied it to normal unsecured traffic.

No other company presently does this or anything that compares. Not Microsoft nor Apple etc. The only other company that has done anything like this is Opera, with their Opera Mini browser and they got bad press for it.

Best regards,
Hans


On 3 Oct 2011, at 08:40, "John Bartow" <john at winhaven.net> wrote:

> "If you're concerned with online privacy, I simply wouldn't use the Silk
> browser in its full mode. To Amazon's credit, you can opt out of Silk's
> cloud-enhanced mode. To quote Amazon, "You can also choose to operate Amazon
> Silk in basic or 'off-cloud' mode."
> 
> Paranoia is great. Does anyone really think that Apple gives the same
> consideration with the Mac/iPhone/iPod/iPad? Since they pretty much force
> you to use Apple services by setting them as defaults, for almost
> everything, they are collecting data about everyone in a much more succinct
> manner. They are an inline hardware/OS/software/service and sales stack.
> Amazon finally joins them in that stack (although it isn't as complete as
> Apple's) and immediately they get smashed for it. If only Amazon had thought
> to form a technological cult for protection from this kind of slander (like
> Apple did ;o) I wonder if this article was written on a Mac.
> 
> While I also don't trust any large corporation, I realize that as soon as I
> connect to a web site my ISP (presently AT&T) know about it. I can't think
> of a large corporation I trust less.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
> [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Jim Lawrence
> Sent: Monday, October 03, 2011 7:19 AM
> To: 'Discussion of Hardware and Software issues'
> Subject: [dba-Tech] FW: Amazon Kindle Fire spies on your internet traffic
> 
> Just received the following email so thought I would pass it along. 
> 
> " It would appear that surfing the web on the Amazon Kindle Fire forces you
> to go through a proxy on their servers, instead of accessing the websites
> directly, meaning that they can track everything you do, everything you
> read, everything you write, including over HTTPS.
> 
> This is really really bad. Do not buy a Kindle Fire. I highly discourage
> this.
> 
> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/amazons-kindle-fire-silk-browser-has-se
> rious-security-concerns/1516?tag=content;siu-container "
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Jim
> 
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