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FTC hits Amazon with $25M fine

Published June 01. 2023 01:49PM

WASHINGTON (AP) - 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 queuing 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 FCT consumer protection chief, said in a statement. The 1998 law is designed to shield children from online harms.

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 agency ordered the company to delete inactive child accounts as well as certain voice and geolocation data.

FILE - Ernie Field pushes the doorbell on his Ring doorbell camera, July 16, 2019, at his home in Wolcott, Conn. In a vote Wednesday, May 31, 2023, the Federal Trade Commission is ordering Amazon to pay more than $30 million in fines over privacy violations involving its voice assistant Alexa and its doorbell camera Ring. (AP Photo/Jessica Hill, File)
FILE - Amazon Echo and Echo Plus devices, behind, sit near illuminated Echo Button devices during an event by the company in Seattle, Sept. 27, 2017. In a vote Wednesday, May 31, 2023, the Federal Trade Commission is ordering Amazon to pay more than $30 million in fines over privacy violations involving its voice assistant Alexa and its doorbell camera Ring. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File)