Amazon this Wednesday agreed a fine of 23.4 million euros with US authorities for allegedly violating children’s privacy rules with its popular Alexa voice assistant.
The e-commerce giant has also committed to reform practices to exclude recordings of minors and introduce stricter privacy measures, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced in a statement.
Amazon, in turn, confirmed that it has reached an agreement with US authorities to resolve the FTC’s complaints about the processing of data collected by Alexa.
“While we disagree with the FTC’s allegations and deny that we violated the law, this settlement resolves the matter and we believe it is important to put it into context,” the company said in a statement.
In the note, it emphasizes that it takes its responsibilities to Alexa users and families very seriously and defends the agreed measures so it will continue to introduce more privacy features in the future.
According to the FTC, Amazon violated Children’s Online Privacy Protection (COPPA) rules by preventing parents from exercising their right to delete data and by retaining sensitive voice and geolocation data for years for their benefit, increasing the risk of inappropriate access to data arises.
“Amazon’s history of deceiving parents, indefinitely retaining children’s recordings, and disobeying parent takedown requests was a violation of COPPA and sacrificed privacy for profit.” said in a statement the director of the FTC’s consumer protection division, Samuel Levine.
As part of the settlement, Amazon will have to delete inactive child accounts and certain recording and geolocation information, and will not be able to use that data for algorithms.
The deal was announced on the same day that Ring, an Amazon subsidiary that specializes in selling video doorbells for homes, agreed to pay another fine for violating privacy laws when handling recorded data.
Source: DN
