Amazon's Silk Browser To Be A Data Mining Jackpot

from the is-there-an-encryption-app? dept

We've already discussed whether Amazon's Kindle Fire 'Silk' browser is a copyright lawsuit waiting to happen, for the way it apparently is going to cache and modify content from its own AWS servers. It seems that people are realizing some other potential issues with it as well. Keith Dawson points us to a couple of interesting stories looking at the data mining implications. The first, by Chris Espinosa, summarizes the issue succinctly:

The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based browser has to only download one simple stream from Amazon’s servers. 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 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. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.

So there's that. Of course, there are a few caveats here. In theory, your ISP could have much of the same info -- though you can get around it with encryption. Furthermore, your ISP isn't caching everything, so there are some limitations there. Of course, on the flip side, the Silk browser is only on the Kindle Fire, meaning Amazon is only getting such data based on what people surf over that particular tablet device and its 7-inch screen. It might be interesting to see some data here, but I'd bet the sort of browsing done on such a device is not representative of how people surf the wider web.

Of course, things could get more interesting if Amazon decides to enter the browser wars in a bigger way... such as by releasing Silk as a desktop browser as well. That theory is posited in another article highlighted by Dawson, this one by Joe Brockmeier, which delves deeply into the implications of the Silk browser on a variety of fronts. He's the first person I've seen bring up the idea of Amazon entering the larger desktop browser wars:

But does it seem likely that Amazon will put that much emphasis on Silk just for the Fire? I don't think that's likely. Amazon has several jobs posted for Silk engineers, and while mobile is mentioned, it's not exclusive. I strongly suspect that Amazon is going to be releasing a Silk desktop browser eventually. Probably not in the near future – Amazon needs to make sure that its infrastructure can handle the onslaught of all the Kindle users before trying to scale to an unknown number of desktop users.

Remember when people said the browser wars were over and Microsoft had won? Yeah. Anyway, Brockmeier's article also notes that Amazon won't just have all this aggregate info, but in theory can tie the info specifically to the Amazon account holder:

Each Kindle is tied to an Amazon ID, which gives Amazon a great deal of information about you already. Introducing Silk into the mix and Amazon is going to be in a position to know a great deal about your Web browsing habits along with your buying habits and media habits. Now Amazon is in a position to know what books you buy, what shows you watch, the Web sites you visit and much more.

Perhaps it's not just copyright lawsuits that Amazon will be facing with Silk.

Filed Under: browser, data mining, kindle, kindle fire, silk
Companies: amazon

Is Amazon's New Silk 'Cloud' Browser A Huge Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Waiting To Happen?

from the caching dept

There's been plenty of fanfare over Amazon's new Android-based e-reader, the Kindle Fire, with one interesting feature being the new Silk browser, which is differentiated by the fact that it's built on top of Amazon's cloud web services storage, allowing it to effectively cache and optimize content on its own servers. But this raises a big question. As Stephan Kinsella points out, technically, this may be copyright infringment. First up, here's Amazon's video explanation of the browser: Based on the info in that video, Kinsella explains the legal concerns:

One smart thing Silk does to speed up web browsing as seen by the user of the Kindle Fire by “pre-loading” content into Amazon’s “cache” in its own “Amazon computer cloud” (i.e. Amazon’s servers)–and to optimize them for the Kindle Fire (e.g., a 3MB image is scaled down maybe to 50k because that would look the same on the Kindle Fire as a 3MB image, but could be transmitted more quickly). But to do this Amazon’s servers have to store copies of files obtained from other websites, including images (as explicitly stated at 3:07 to 3:26) and other files which, of course, are covered by copyright. At 3:54, it’s explained that if Amazon’s computing cloud sees you looking at the New York Times home page, and it predicts, based on other user statistics, that you are somewhat likely to next click on some NY Times subpage link, then the Amazon servers will go ahead and download that next link, and cache it, in case you do click on it next, so that it can serve it up more quickly. Now this makes sense technically, but what it really means is Amazon’s servers are making copies of other people’s copyright-protected content: images, files, NYTimes web pages, and serving them up to Kindle Fire users as if the Amazon computer cloud servers are the host of those images. It is a bit like if Amazon ran a site called NYTimes2.com, and had its servers constantly copying content from NYtimes.com and duplicating it on NYTimes2.com, and serving up the content on NYTimes2.com (which was copied from NYTimes.com) to browsers.

Of course, as he notes (and as the people in the video note), this makes tremendous technological sense. It makes for a much better experience. But copyright can and often is used to stop innovations that make tremendous technological sense, because they can upset legacy business models. Of course, one could argue that what Amazon is doing here is no different than what Google does with it's cache -- but that might not stop a potential legal fight, unfortunately.

Filed Under: browsers, copyright, ereaders, kindle, kindle fire, silk browser
Companies: amazon