US: Amazon Agrees to Penalty for Alexa's Children's Privacy Charges

The U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday that Amazon.com Inc and a subsidiary agreed to a permanent injunction and to pay a $25 million civil penalty as part of a settlement to resolve alleged violations of a children's privacy law relating to its Alexa voice assistant.

Amazon in early June agreed to pay the $25 million civil penalty.

Separately, the company agreed to pay $5.8 million in customer refunds for alleged privacy violations involving its doorbell camera Ring.

The Alexa-related action orders Amazon to overhaul its data deletion practices and impose stricter, more transparent privacy measures. It also obliges the tech giant to delete certain data collected by its internet-connected digital assistant, which people use for everything from checking the weather to playing games and queueing up music.

"Amazon’s history of misleading parents, keeping children’s recordings indefinitely, and flouting parents’ deletion requests violated COPPA (the Child Online Privacy Protection Act) and sacrificed privacy for profits," Samuel Levine, the FCT consumer protection chief, said in a statement. The 1998 law is designed to shield children from online harms.

FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya said in a statement that "when parents asked Amazon to delete their kids’ Alexa voice data, the company did not delete all of it."

The agency ordered the company to delete inactive child accounts as well as certain voice and geolocation data.

Amazon kept the kids’ data to refine its voice recognition algorithm, the artificial intelligence behind Alexa, which powers Echo and other smart speakers, Bedoya said. The FTC complaint sends a message to all tech companies who are "sprinting to do the same" amid fierce competition in developing AI datasets, he added.

"Nothing is more visceral to a parent than the sound of their child’s voice," tweeted Bedoya, the father of two small children.