It appears that the whole Apple-FBI encryption scandal is making bigger waves, that are affecting other companies. For example, Amazon decided to remove the support for encryption from Fire OS 5, which means Fire tablet users have to either update and lose encryption or keep the current outdated version of the OS.
A few weeks ago people started noticing this change and interestingly Amazon was shy about announcing this in public. The tweet from David Scovetta shown above shed light on the matter. Amazon also removed the VPN option from its tablets quietly a while ago. Interestingly, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels stated that he’s pro encryption and believes you can’t have a connected business or Internet-connected business without protection and security of customers, which means encryption is important.
A post on the Amazon forums explains that encryption was taken off in order to avoid devices from being reset to factory default if the password was forgotten. In the meantime, Amazon reached out to the source link and claimed that “all Fire tablets’ communication with Amazon’s cloud meet our high standards for privacy and security including appropriate use of encryption”.
They also admit that some enterprise features were removed last fall when Fire OS 5 was released, those that customers were not using. So, a layer of encryption is still present, in spite of that notification, it seems.
