Amazon agreed Wednesday to pay a $25 million civil penalty to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations it violated a child privacy law and deceived parents by keeping for years kids' voice and location data recorded by its popular Alexa voice assistant. Separately, the company agreed to pay $5.8 million in customer refunds for alleged privacy violations involving its doorbell camera Ring. The Alexa-related action orders Amazon to overhaul its data deletion practices and impose stricter, more transparent privacy measures. It also obliges the tech giant to delete certain data collected by its internet-connected digital assistant, which people use for everything from checking the weather to playing games and queueing up music.
"Amazon’s history of misleading parents, keeping children’s recordings indefinitely, and flouting parents’ deletion requests violated COPPA (the Child Online Privacy Protection Act) and sacrificed privacy for profits,” Samuel Levine, the FTC consumer protection chief, said in a statement. The 1998 law is designed to shield children from online harm. FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya said in a statement that "when parents asked Amazon to delete their kids’ Alexa voice data, the company did not delete all of it," the AP reports. The agency ordered the company to delete inactive child accounts as well as certain voice and geolocation data.
Amazon kept the kids' data to refine its voice recognition algorithm, the artificial intelligence behind Alexa, which powers Echo and other smart speakers, Bedova said. In the Ring case, the FTC says Amazon's home security camera subsidiary let employees and contractors access consumers' private videos and provided lax security practices that enabled hackers to take control of some accounts. Amazon bought California-based Ring in 2018, and many of the violations alleged by the FTC predate the acquisition. Amazon said it disagreed with the FTC’s claims on both Alexa and Ring and denied violating the law. But it said the settlements "put these matters behind us." The proposed orders must be approved by federal judges.
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