The electronic commerce giant Amazon has complied with the request of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC, US consumer watchdog) to put an end to accusations of violation of the privacy of its customers, reports the American newspaper . New York Times. Therefore, on May 31, the company paid around 30 million dollars, or just over 28 million euros, to avoid prosecution.
According to the complaint filed jointly by the FTC and the US Department of Justice, Amazon prevented families from exercising their right to opt out of data collected by the Alexa voice assistant and Ring security cameras from two of its products. . However, the Children’s Online Data Protection Act (COPPA Rules) requires companies to comply with it. Thus, the geolocation data and voice data were kept by the company for several years.
“Sacrificing privacy for profit”
The complaint also states that, despite repeated promises of deletion over the years, Amazon saved these files without the consent of its customers, and did so to “improve and train the Alexa algorithm,” the voice assistant. . For these acts, the company had to pay 25 million dollars.
Regarding Ring’s home surveillance cameras, the complaint states that the company gave too many employees unrestricted access to the data collected by the camera. The videos in question would also have been used to train the algorithms of the company’s products. For this case, Amazon had to pay 5.8 million dollars, a total of 30 million.
Source: BFM TV
