While Apple fights the good fight, @Amazon removes encryption as option from FireOS 5 | @csoghoian @normative @eff pic.twitter.com/nggBdtFG7j
— David Scovetta (@davidscovetta) March 3, 2016
If you own an Amazon device that runs FireOS, you might want to know that Amazon has decided to remove encryption support in recent releases of FireOS 5.
As mentioned on Amazon’s support forums, Amazon has been slowly deprecating support for device encryption, eventually culminating in its removal altogether. Thie removal of encryption options affects new Fire tablets as well as older devices that have been upgraded to the latest version of Fire OS.
Amazon has since clarified with Ars Technica as to why they’ve removed encryption support. According to them, encryption support was removed in FireOS 5 because the feature wasn’t being used. “In the fall when we released FireOS 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,” says Amazon.
Simply put, while data stored on the device itself is unencrypted, connections between the device and external servers are still encrypted.
Source: Ars Technica