Amazon disabled encryption on its tablets and phones because nobody used it

Amazon caught flack on Wednesday for disabling the encryption capabilities of its Fire phones and tablets with a software update. The company says its reasoning was simple: people didn’t use it.

“In the fall when we released Fire OS 5, we removed some enterprise features that we found customers weren’t using,” Amazon spokeswoman Robin Handaly wrote in an email.

Those “enterprise features” included one that allowed users to encrypt their entire device with a PIN that would erase all their data if not entered correctly 30 times in a row. 

The issue surfaced recently because Amazon just allowed older tablets — the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 and the Fire HD 6/7 — to upgrade from Fire OS 4, the previous version of the company’s Android fork. 

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