Amazon quietly removed the security option when it released its latest operating system and hoped no-one would notice. However there was an outcry from customers and privacy experts.  Now it seems that Amazon has back-peddled and will return the option for full-disk encryption in its spring update.

Amazon's decision to drop encryption from the Fire operating system came to light late this week. The company said it had removed the feature in a version of its Fire OS that began shipping in the fall because few customers used it. On-device encryption scrambles data so that the device can be accessed only if the user enters the correct password. 

To be fair to Amazon it is hard to see why anyone would need it and it is not clear who really did the complaining.  According to the Tame Apple Press the outcry is all because Apple is bravely taking on the FBI to continue allowing encyrption on mobile devices. We would have thought that encyrpting an entire Fire Tablet would be pointless as the most of the things which would be encrypted were books and videos. The only thing which would be useful to encrypt would be emails.  What is telling is that Amazon users agreed and didn't use it. Maybe the Tame Apple Press could not stand it if a tech company departed from the Apple hymn sheet on the subject.