Amazon Falls Back In Love With Encryption Support

Encryption has become one of the hottest debated subjects in the tech industry lately, and even Amazon has had its name thrown into the mix of stories.

Just last week, Amazon found itself at the forefront of an encryption discussion following the news that it had dropped encryption from its Fire operating system. But soon after that news broke, there was plenty of backlash against it.

Amazon has now gone back on its decision and announced it will bring back encryption support for its Fire OS.

The story initially reached its peak when cybersecurity professionals began posting images of the language Amazon had inserted into its tablets’ user guides explaining the change. However, without any official statement from Amazon, owners of the retailer’s devices, like coder and activist Aral Balkan, were left puzzled.

“I will definitely be getting rid of the Fire after this,” Balkan told Motherboard last week. “I might keep the Kindle Paperwhite purely for reading books, but, to be honest, my gut feeling is to shut my Amazon account in protest.”

Interestingly enough, the news from Amazon came not long after Amazon CTO Werner Vogels gave a speech at the Mobile World Congress about the importance of encryption to Amazon’s business model.

“Encryption plays a very, very important role in that,” Vogels was quoted as saying at MWC. “To be honest, it is one of the few really strong tools we have so customers know that only they have access to their data and nobody else.”

Now, the latest news shows that the privacy advocate backlash has the eCommerce giant changing its stance. While Amazon had said its plan to drop the feature was because not many customers used it, it clearly saw the need to bring it back once input from outside the company began to flood in. Cryptologist Bruce Schneier went as far as calling Amazon’s decision to remove the encryption feature “stupid.”

“We will return the option for full-disk encryption with a Fire OS update coming this spring,” company spokeswoman Robin Handaly told Reuters by email over the weekend.

In light of the conversations surrounding Apple and the San Bernardino iPhone encryption battle, Amazon may have decided now was not the time to test the encryption waters.