As Apple fights the FBI tooth and nail, Amazon drops Kindle encryption

boing
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When you said

Amazon drops Kindle encryption

I was hoping that they had dropped their ebook encryption, not the device encryption. Not that it is hard to bypass it, but it would be nice.

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I just bought the entry-level Fire during the recent sale. I havenā€™t used it much, but itā€™s okay so far. Why Kindle? Iā€™ve fallen into the bad habit of cruising free book sites (my current favorite is Centsless Books ) and grabbing anything that suits my fancy. As a result, Iā€™ve got several thousand Kindle ebooks. Thatā€™s an awful lot of books to convert to another format and with the deal I figured, why not try the Fire?

I donā€™t intend to do any sensitive browsing on the Kindle, so the lack of encryption isnā€™t a huge worry (though Iā€™d probably be a little embarrassed if just anyone could view some of my moreā€¦ adventurous choices. --What?!? They were free.) What bugs me is, the OS wonā€™t let me load books onto the microSD card. It only stores books on the built-in storage. And now itā€™s almost full. Why promise us all this potential storage capacity and then not let us use it as we wish? Not cool, Amazon.

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The funny thing is, you donā€™t have to; the Kindle app is available on Mac, PC, iPad, iPhone, and Android, and you can just transfer over your purchases ā€“ no conversion necessary. Kindles are still best at reading Kindle ebooks, but Iā€™ve got several friends who buy Kindle books for their iPads.

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I do have the Kindle app for my laptop and my phone (I do most of my ebook reading on my Samsung Galaxy s4.) I was hoping the larger screen would make reading more comfortable, and for $40 (minus $20 for picking up an Amazon store card) I figured, why not try a Kindle?

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Apparently Amazon has already done a 180 on encryption: http://www.engadget.com/2016/03/04/amazon-will-bring-encryption-back-to-FireOS/

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The disturbing question that I think caused the 180:

If this was going to be Amazonā€™s position on the Kindle/Fire OS, then could similar policies on AWS be far behind?

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Err, one is a massive corporate/enterprise solution designed for managing sensitive data, and the other is a handheld tablet? You might as well ask if they are planning on stopping sales of books by the esteemed author Neil Stephenson because he mentions cryptography; itā€™s just as analogous.

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Except businesses run in AWS, and encryption is kind of a big deal. It may be different teams, but they all take their marching orders from Bezos.

If you canā€™t trust Amazon to encrypt the little things, can you trust them with the transparent or other encryption on other products? (The answer is no even if Amazon provides strong encryptionā€¦ but thatā€™s a whole other security fight)

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Thatā€™s exactly my point - that they are business focused systems and so have a totally different use case than a tablet.

Even if Bezos was personally behind the switch to decrypt the Fire Tablets (which he may or may not have been), that doesnā€™t mean that heā€™s going to apply that same thought process to something like AWS, which could have direct legal implications beyond that.

Not offering full disk encryption on a tablet is a failure to provide a consumer product. Somehow dropped the idea of encryption on business services could open them up to significant legal action due to the idea of exposing PII data, etc.

Again, Iā€™m saying theyā€™re on totally different pages, lumping them together is crazy.

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One thing to add here about the Paperwhite (and other Kindles, minus the Fire): the ad-supported cheaper version is worthwhile. It only really pops up ads on the lock screen, so for me anyway, it wasnā€™t intrusive or bothersome at all, and saved me $50.

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And you can root it and remove the ads, too.

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