Big Tech, Big Consequences: Amazon Faces $25M Fine for Alexa’s Violation of Privacy Rules

The FTC claims that Amazon “sacrificed privacy for profits” by ignoring parents’ pleas to have their children’s data deleted. Amazon will reimburse the Federal Trade Commission over thirty million dollars to resolve claims that its Alexa and Ring divisions violated customers’ privacy. The agency launched a lawsuit, which Amazon resolved by consenting to pay $5.8 million to resolve, charging that Amazon’s Ring doorbell operation violated a provision of the FTC Act that forbids unfair or misleading business practices.

On May 31, Amazon agreed to pay a $25 million fine to the US government for allegedly keeping recordings of children’s voices on Alexa despite parental pleas to have them removed. The US government alleges that Amazon recorded children and used transcripts of the recordings to develop its product despite deletion orders, in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. The Department of Justice brought the complaint on behalf of the Federal Trade Commission. Over 800,000 kids under the age of 13 possess independent Alexa profiles. A $5.8 million punishment against Amazon-owned home surveillance business Ring is also part of the deal.

The ring must remove any client videos and “face embeddings,” or data gathered from a person’s face, that were acquired before 2018 as part of the agreed settlement. The FTC claims that they had access to see and download private consumer video footage for their own use. One of the officers allegedly watched tens of thousands of footage taken by female Ring camera users who “monitor intimate spaces in their homes, such as bathrooms or bedrooms.”

According to the complaint, the employee had only halted after a coworker became aware of his behavior. “These settlements put these issues behind us, even though we disagree with the FTC’s allegations regarding Alexa and Ring and deny breaking the law,” stated Amazon. The business claimed that it would keep developing new privacy options for customers.

Additionally, it must discard any output it produced using those movies. In a further lawsuit, it is claimed that Amazon illegally stored thousands of children’s accounts with the Alexa voice assistant, infringing both the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and the FTC Act.

Amazon May Have Found Children’s Speech Patterns To Be Particularly Useful

According to a news release from the FTC, since children’s speech patterns differ from adults’, Amazon may have found children’s speech patterns to be particularly useful. The recordings of children’s voices could have served as a beneficial training dataset utilized by the Alexa algorithm, helping it to better recognize children’s voices. According to the authorities, Amazon failed to develop a system that would properly honor requests for data erasure.

Every parent who owns an Alexa voice interface recognizes that their children enjoy playing with it, making it crack jokes, and even engaging it for its stated purpose, whatever that may be. Alexa is an Amazon product that has been used in homes all over the world for years. In reality, the FTC reduced COPPA standards to allow appropriate usage because it was so manifestly helpful to children who cannot write or have disabilities: Transcription and other service-specific analyses of children’s data are permitted as long as they don’t last any longer than is reasonable. It appears that Amazon could have adopted a pretty liberal stance on the “fairly necessary” timeframe by collecting children’s speech data for practically indefinite amounts of time.

Compared to other internet companies’ fines for comparable offenses, such as Google’s $170 million compromise with the FTC over YouTube’s acquisition of children’s data, the $25 million fine is substantially less severe. The agreement nonetheless demonstrates that the US authorities are paying more attention to the methods used by major computer firms and how they handle user data.

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Typically, timing like that suggests that a business would have kept up this practice indefinitely. Apparently, some of the procedures did endure until 2022 as a result of “faulty fixes and process fiascos”! What purpose it serves to have numerous recordings of children speaking to Alexa, you may possibly wonder. It certainly helps to have a hidden library of audio conversations that you can use to train the models you use for machine learning if you want to have your voice interface communicate with children a lot. According to the FTC, this is how Amazon defended the keeping of this data.

As internet businesses’ influence has expanded and their services and products have become more pervasive in people’s lives, worries about privacy and data protection have risen in recent years. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation and California’s Consumer Privacy Act are two recent examples of legislation aimed at preserving consumer privacy. Governments all over the world are increasingly taking moves to regulate the IT industry more strictly.

It is conceivable that authorities and lawmakers will scrutinize Amazon more in the future as it continues to grow and diversify its company. The corporation has already been under fire for how it treats its employees and how it affects the neighborhood, and this most recent settlement serves as a reminder that even the biggest digital companies in the world are not above the law.