Amazon will pay a $25 million fine to the FTC for violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Rule (COPPA Rule). Amazon failed to honor users’ requests for data deletion and gave parents adequate notice before deletion, even after it was made aware of its failures.
Major online retailer, Amazon, will pay a $25 million fine to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for breaking the law protecting children’s privacy by storing their Alexa voice recordings and misleading users of the Alexa personal assistant service and their parents about how it deletes data.
As a result of Amazon’s violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Rule (COPPA Rule), the FTC and the Department of Justice declared in a statement that they will demand the business “overhaul its deletion practices and implement stringent privacy safeguards”.
The complaint claims that Amazon prohibited parents from using their COPPA Rule deletion rights, stored private voice and location data for years, and exploited the data for its own purposes, placing the data at risk of harm from unauthorized access.
According to Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, “Amazon’s history of misleading parents, keeping children’s recordings for an extended period of time, and ignoring parents’ deletion requests violated COPPA and sacrificed privacy for profits.” “COPPA prohibits businesses from keeping children’s data for ever, and especially not to train their algorithms,”
It will be against the law for Amazon to use dormant kid accounts, specific voice recordings, and geolocation data to train its algorithms; instead, it will have to erase them. To become effective, the proposed order needs to be authorized by the federal court.
Amazon is said to have informed its customers, including parents, “prominently and repeatedly” that they could remove voice recordings obtained by its Alexa voice assistant and geolocation data obtained by the Alexa app. However, the firm fell short of these commitments when it illegally held some of this data for years and utilized it to enhance the Alexa algorithm, according to the complaint.
According to Amazon, its Alexa service and Echo devices are “designed to protect your privacy” and that customers may remove voice and geolocation records and geolocation data. Unless a parent asked that this information be removed, Amazon preserved children’s recordings indefinitely, the complaint claims. The FTC said that even after a parent requested that material be deleted, Amazon did not remove transcripts of what children had said from any of its databases.
According to the lawsuit, Amazon stated that it saved recordings of children’s voices to assist it in responding to voice requests, let parents to listen to them, and enhance Alexa’s speech recognition and processing abilities. According to the FTC, the firm did not put in place a sufficient structure to guarantee that it honored users’ requests for data deletion and that it gave parents adequate notice before deletion. The FTC said that Amazon continually failed to address the issues even after it was made aware of its failures to erase geolocation data.
