Amazon Fined $25 Million for Deceiving Parents, Violating Child Privacy Law
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fined Amazon $25 million for violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA(Opens in a new window)) and deceiving parents regarding data deletion practices.
The Department of Justice filed the complaint(Opens in a new window) on behalf of the FTC claiming Amazon is failing parents and children on several fronts with regards to data collected through Alexa voice assistant services and the company's range of smart speakers.
According to Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection:
"Amazon’s history of misleading parents, keeping children’s recordings indefinitely, and flouting parents’ deletion requests violated COPPA and sacrificed privacy for profits ... COPPA does not allow companies to keep children’s data forever for any reason, and certainly not to train their algorithms."
The complaint details how Amazon "assured its users, including parents, that they could delete voice recordings collected from its Alexa voice assistant and geolocation information collected by the Alexa app." However, parents were prevented from deleting data under the COPPA Rule and instead Amazon retained voice and geolocation data indefinitely.
Parents could request deletion of the data, but the FTC found Amazon continued to retain transcripts of what children said regardless of the request. Amazon explained it kept the voice recordings of children to "help it respond to voice commands, allow parents to review them, and to improve Alexa’s speech recognition and processing capabilities." The FTC believes Amazon was simply "benefitting its bottom line at the expense of children’s privacy."
As The Wall Street Journal(Opens in a new window) reports, Amazon agreed to settle
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