The FTC and the DOJ in the USA have announced that Amazon will pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit related to privacy with Amazon’s Alexa. According to the Federal Trade Commission, this is related to the date of children.
Amazon will have to make changes to the way it holds data of children, the FTC has said that Amazon violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Rule, you can see more details on this below.
According to a complaint filed by the Department of Justice on behalf of the FTC, Amazon prevented parents from exercising their deletion rights under the COPPA Rule, kept sensitive voice and geolocation data for years, and used it for its own purposes, while putting data at risk of harm from unnecessary access.
“Amazon’s history of misleading parents, keeping children’s recordings indefinitely, and flouting parents’ deletion requests violated COPPA and sacrificed privacy for profits,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “COPPA does not allow companies to keep children’s data forever for any reason, and certainly not to train their algorithms.”
Under the proposed federal court order also filed by DOJ, Amazon will be required to delete inactive child accounts and certain voice recordings and geolocation information and will be prohibited from using such data to train its algorithms. The proposed order must be approved by the federal court to go into effect.
You can find out full details about the agreement between Amazon and the Federal Trade Commission related to Amazon Alexa and the data held by Amazon over at the FTC website at the link below.
Source Amazon
Image Credit: Lazar Gugleta
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