Amazon has agreed to pay US$25 million (£20 million) to settle claims that it breached children’s privacy rights through its Alexa voice assistant. The tech big reached a settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after being accused of not deleting Alexa recordings when requested by mother and father, resulting in the retention of sensitive information for years. Additionally, Amazon’s doorbell digital camera subsidiary, Ring, pays US$5.eight million (£4.6 million) after granting workers unrestricted access to buyer knowledge.
The FTC complaint stated that Amazon reassured users, together with dad and mom, that they could delete voice recordings collected by Alexa. However, the corporate didn’t comply, retaining the info unlawfully to reinforce its Alexa algorithm. Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, accused Amazon of “misleading mother and father, maintaining children’s recordings indefinitely, and flouting parents’ deletion requests”, prioritising earnings over privacy.
Comprehensive revealed that Ring, acquired by Amazon in 2018, permitted “thousands of employees and contractors” to view recordings of customers’ non-public areas. These people could access and obtain delicate video information for private use. Amazon informed the BBC that “Ring promptly addressed the issues at hand by itself years in the past, well earlier than the FTC started its inquiry”. However, the complaint disclosed that one worker considered thousands of video recordings of female customers in intimate spaces, such as bogs or bedrooms, and was only stopped when a colleague observed..