The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been investigating Silk, the web browser built into Amazon's new Android-derived Kindle Fire. Silk is billed as being a very fast browser, thanks to acceleration achieved by funneling all requests through Amazon's cloud servers. This may speed up network sessions, but it creates many privacy questions, since it means Amazon gets a view into your network sessions that it wouldn't otherwise have — a copy of all the web-pages you receive.

But as Dan Auerbach reports, Amazon made some very good privacy choices in the design of Silk. First, the "acceleration" is user-configurable, and you can just turn it off if you're worried. Further, SSL connections are never intercepted, and Amazon only lightly logs your network sessions, and expires those logs after 30 days. The service isn't perfect, but it's got a lot to recommend it.