Amazon To Pay Over $30 Mln To Settle FTC Complaints Over Alexa And Ring Privacy Violations

(RTTNews) - Amazon (AMZN) has agreed to pay over $30 million to settle the Federal Trade Commission's allegations of privacy violations via its Alexa voice assistant and Ring doorbell cameras.

The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice will require Amazon to overhaul its deletion practices and implement stringent privacy safeguards to settle charges the company violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act Rule (COPPA Rule) and deceived parents and users of the Alexa voice assistant service about its data deletion practices.

According to a complaint filed by the Department of Justice on behalf of the FTC, Amazon prevented parents from exercising their deletion rights under the COPPA Rule, kept sensitive voice and geolocation data for years, and used it for its own purposes, while putting data at risk of harm from unnecessary access.

"Amazon's history of misleading parents, keeping children's recordings indefinitely, and flouting parents' deletion requests violated COPPA and sacrificed privacy for profits," said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. "COPPA does not allow companies to keep children's data forever for any reason, and certainly not to train their algorithms."

Amazon paid $25 million to settle this suit.

The agency also filed a lawsuit alleging Amazon's Ring doorbell unit violated a portion of the FTC Act that prohibits unfair or deceptive business practices, which Amazon settled by agreeing to pay $5.8 million.

As part of the proposed settlement, Ring is required to delete any customer videos and data collected from an individual's face, referred to as "face embeddings," that it obtained prior to 2018. It must also delete any work products it derived from those videos.