As an update to last weeks’s story about Amazon disabling device encryption in Fire OS 5, the company has since reversed its decision:
Amazon will restore optional full disk encryption to Fire OS 5 in a software update “coming this spring,” according to a statement released by the company on Friday evening.
This is a good announcement but I wouldn’t buy a Fire OS device until the firmware update reenabling device encryption has been rolled out. You never know when Amazon will decide to declare backsies.
As an aside, did you notice how quickly Amazon changed its mind? If this would have been a government decision we would be sitting through years of court cases, congressional hearings, congressional votes, and other such bureaucratic nonsense. But in the market it took less than a week for customer outrage to get things changing. The market gets shit done.