Amazon will pay a $25 million civil penalty to resolve charges that the company violated a child privacy statute. Allegedly, the company misled parents by keeping data on children's voices and whereabouts collected by its popular Alexa voice assistant for years.
Moreover, the firm settled a class action lawsuit over privacy concerns with its Ring doorbell camera by agreeing to repay customers $5.8 million.
All of these are part of a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced on Wednesday, May 31, as reported by AP News.
Alexa Violating a Child Privacy Statute
The suit regarding Alexa mandates that Amazon change its data deletion procedures and implement more stringent, transparent privacy controls. It also requires that the tech giant remove specific information stored by its internet-connected personal assistant, which is used for anything from checking the weather to playing games and arranging playlists.
The FCT's head of consumer protection, Samuel Levine, said in a statement that 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." The said regulation from 1998 is meant to protect kids from the dangers they could face when using the internet.
FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya claimed that Amazon did not fully comply with parents' requests to erase Alexa voice data collected from their children.
Inactive kid accounts were to be deleted, along with certain voice and geolocation data, as per the agency's directive.
Alexa, the artificial intelligence (AI) powering Echo and similar smart speakers, was trained in part using data collected from children, said Bedoya. The FTC action sends a message to other tech firms "sprinting to do the same" in the face of intense rivalry in developing AI datasets, he noted.
In addition to the monetary penalty in the Alexa case, the verdict forbids Amazon from reusing the user's geolocation and voice data that has been wiped out to develop or enhance any data product. Amazon must also establish a privacy program for handling customers' geolocation data per the judgment.
Ring Allowing Access to Private Recordings
In the Ring case, the FTC investigation indicates that Amazon's home security camera subsidiary allegedly allowed employees and contractors access to users' private recordings to train algorithms without consent, CNET reported. It is said that Ring provided insufficient security methods, permitting hackers to gain control of certain accounts.
Many of the FTC's allegations against Ring, a California-based company, stretch back to before Amazon's 2018 purchase. The FTC has ordered that Ring pay $5.8 million to be used for reimbursements to affected customers.
Amazon has dismissed the FTC's accusations against it, saying it did not break any laws in its dealings with Alexa and Ring. However, it said that the agreements had allowed them to "put these matters behind us."
