Regulators allege Amazon collected and stored data on children via its Alexa smart assistant,and did not delete it when requested.
In another case,it said the company’s Ring video doorbells and security cameras had unreasonable privacy practices in January 2020. According to the FTC,Ring employees and contractors were given unrestricted access to view videos taken at users’ homes.
In both cases,the regulators specifically frame the breaches as designed to train Amazon AI and algorithms at the expense of users’ privacy,placing the fines within a trend of lawmakers around the world cracking down on unnecessary data collection and retention.
“Amazon’s history of misleading parents,keeping children’s recordings indefinitely,and flouting parents’ deletion requests violated the children’s online privacy law,and sacrificed privacy for profits.[The law] does not allow companies to keep children’s data forever for any reason,and certainly not to train their algorithms,” the director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection,Samuel Levine,said in a statement.
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“Machine learning is no excuse to break the law,” commissioner Alvaro Bedoya said in a separate statement.
“Claims from businesses that data must be indefinitely retained to improve algorithms do not override legal bans on indefinite retention of data.”
Amazon denies that its practices broke any law,and claims any issues had been addressed before these cases were even initiated.