Kindle Fire and One-Click Shopping

Mitch Lipka, reporting for Reuters:

St. Louis area software engineer Lance Durham says he decided to get a couple of Kindle Fires to give as presents to his children. He was loading some games before wrapping them and realized he couldn’t turn off the single-click ordering, which charges his credit card.

“There was no password or pin, nor any kind of confirmation — the purchase immediately went through,” he says.

So Durham called Amazon and says he was told the ordering from Amazon could not be disabled, and the company suggested he “deregister” the device after every purchase. That, he says, caused the downloaded apps to stop working.

The e-ink Kindles have always worked like this too, but they’re nowhere near as appealing to kids.

★ Sunday, 11 December 2011