You can turn off 1-click purchasing just for the Fire
Update: hold off on doing this. It may not work as we expect. I may test it…*
A thousand thanks to Pineapple in the Kindle Community forum, who reported in this
Amazon Kindle community thread
that you can turn off 1-click purchasing just for your Kindle Fire!
That’s a huge and important change, and will ameliorate a lot of worries people have had.
What it means is that you can greatly reduce the ability of someone on your account to purchase items through the device. For example, Kindle books can only be bought with 1-click…turn that off, and you can’t buy those.
Naturally, you control this on the Amazon website, where you have to enter a password to make changes.
You can go to
and click
Your Account
in your top right corner.
Scroll down to
Settings
and click
1-Click Settings
You’ll see that you now have two places to change your 1-click status. The new one is a “Mobile 1-click” setting. Mine specifically says “Kindle Fire” under that. I also have a Samsung Captivate on my account…I’m pretty sure I can use 1-click on that within the Kindle for Android app, and I’m not sure if that will be affected or not.
Anyway, this should make a lot of parents and other legal guardians breathe a bit easier. It reduces the chances that your kid can buy an inappropriate book, for example…most public domain books (not all, of course) are not as explicit as some contemporary books.
You are already required to enter a PIN (Personal Identification Number) when buying videos, and you can set parental controls for in-app purchasing for apps, but this should simplify things.
*Update: I’ve been informed that this only affects purchases of physical items on the Kindle Fire, not e-books. For more details, see this later post.
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.
I Love My Kindle 
November 26, 2011 at 2:46 pm |
thank you for this! I wasn’t worried about kids getting access so much as I was worried i’d be accidentally buying books and apps that I didn’t really want to buy (just looking at). 1-click is a little too easy sometimes 🙂
November 26, 2011 at 4:49 pm |
Bufo – In my excitement, I may have been hasty. I just now tried it. It will let me purchase books. It apparently is still just for physical items. Plus, once you turn it off you can’t turn it back on! 😦
November 26, 2011 at 5:42 pm |
“once you turn it off you can’t turn it back on”
That seems hard to believe – I mean, they want you to have it on, don’t they, to encourage spending with amazon? will be interested in hearing more about this.
November 26, 2011 at 6:07 pm |
I know, it is odd. Once it’s turned off the option totally disappears from the screen.
November 26, 2011 at 6:59 pm |
I turned one-click off as soon as I got my Fire for fear I’d accidentally hit a button and purchase something. And I did. Even with one-click off, I bought a video series. I called Amazon to get a refund and they told me that one-click cannot be turned off for the video store.
November 27, 2011 at 4:21 pm |
Bufo, in my experience, after turning off 1-click for mobile devices, my grandkids were still able to download movies, music, apps and tv shows to my fire. Have to say, they asked first and I said ok. But all they had to do after that was click away. 🙂 Turning off 1-click just seems to limit purchases from the Amazon.com app.
November 28, 2011 at 1:38 am |
Yep. My same experience.
I went through this whole process with Amazon customer support on the phone and it still allowed purchases to go through. The test was a Captain America movie.
On Click is off on my settings and it does NOT stop purchasing.
Amazon’s got to fix this.
May 2, 2012 at 1:46 pm |
So thanksful for this post. Kiddos bought a movie without my permission….thanks to 1 click.
May 3, 2012 at 1:26 pm |
Thanks for writing, Lindsey!
Thanks for letting me know! I’m glad I could help.