Despite its support for Apple in the computer company’s fight over encryption with the FBI, Amazon has quietly removed enterprise-level encryption from its Amazon Fire tablets, which run its proprietary operating system Fire OS. All of Amazon’s other devices run Fire OS, but the change only affects tablets, the Daily Dot reports. While Fire OS will no longer have data encryption, it appears that the devices themselves will continue to. According to BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow, this means, “[i]f you run the update and then lose your device, whomever finds it will be able to see any private or sensitive information you’ve stored on it (if you don’t run the update, you won’t get patches and your device will be liable to being taken over by hackers).”
Confusingly, according to Amazon, this doesn’t mean that the devices will be less secure. In a statement, they said, “In the fall when we released Fire OS 5, we removed some enterprise features that we found customers weren’t using. All Fire tablets’ communication with Amazon’s cloud meet our high standards for privacy and security including appropriate use of encryption.”
