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Amazon has agreed to pay more than $US30 million ($47 million) in fines to US regulators following allegations of historical privacy abuses, including retaining data collected from children after being explicitly asked to delete it.
In one case, the US Federal Trade Commission had alleged that before mid-2019, the company failed to remove voice recordings, transcriptions and precise location data collected from children via the Alexa voice assistant even after parents requested their removal.
Regulators allege Amazon collected and stored data on children via its Alexa smart assistant, and did not delete it when requested.
In another case, it said the company’s Ring video doorbells and security cameras had unreasonable privacy practices through January 2020. According to the FTC, Ring employees and contractors were given unrestricted access to view videos taken at users’ homes.
In both cases, the regulators specifically frame the breaches as designed to train Amazon AI and algorithms at the expense of users’ privacy, placing the fines within a trend of lawmakers around the world cracking down on unnecessary data collection and retention.
“Amazon’s history of misleading parents, keeping children’s recordings indefinitely, and flouting parents’ deletion requests violated the children’s online privacy law, and sacrificed privacy for profits. [The law] does not allow companies to keep children’s data forever for any reason, and certainly not to train their algorithms,” said the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection Samuel Levine, in a statement.
“Machine learning is no excuse to break the law,” said commissioner Alvaro Bedoya in a separate statement.
“Claims from businesses that data must be indefinitely retained to improve algorithms do not override legal bans on indefinite retention of data.”
Amazon denies that its practices broke any law, and claims any issues had been addressed before these cases were even initiated.
“At Amazon, we take our responsibilities to our customers and their families very seriously,” an Amazon spokesperson said.
“Our devices and services are built to protect customers’ privacy, and to provide customers with control over their experience. While we disagree with the FTC’s claims regarding both Alexa and Ring and deny violating the law, these settlements put these matters behind us.”
The fines given out in these cases — $US25 million for the Alexa data collection, and $US5.8 million for the Ring cameras — are arguably not significant measured against the $US514 billion Amazon made in revenue in 2022. But the FTC and other regulators are determined to send a message to big tech companies on data retention, especially when it comes to children.
In December, Fortnite-maker Epic Games agreed to pay $US520 million to settle accusations it illegally harvested data from pre-teen players, and tricked players into making purchases. In 2019, Google agreed to pay a $US170 million fine after allegations it had violated children’s privacy on YouTube.
In Australia, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission last year ordered Google to pay $60 million after alleging it collected data from Android phones without permission in 2017 and 2018.
Last year, the European Union fined Meta more than $660 million related to its data practices and children using Instagram, and this year it fined the company more than $2 billion for illegally transferring user data internationally.
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