Uncovering and explaining how our digital world is changing — and changing us.

Locally stored data on Amazon Fire devices is no longer encrypted. Anyone who upgrades their Kindle Fire, Fire Phone, Amazon Fire HD, or Amazon Fire TV Stick to Fire OS 5 will have local information left vulnerable to cyber attacks and stored in plain text. Amazon forum members first flagged the encryption removal and were later followed by Twitter user David Scovetta last night.

It’s unclear why the company would choose to deprecate its encryption standards. An Amazon spokesperson did try to clarify. “When we released Fire OS 5, we removed some enterprise features that we found customers weren’t using,” the spokesperson told The Verge.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »