E-commerce giant Amazon will be paying $25 million as penalty to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for violating the children’s privacy law, according to a report by IANS.
Amazon would be required to overhaul its deletion practices and implement stringent privacy safeguards as the company violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) Rule, said FTC and Department of Justice in a statement.
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According to the complaint, 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, the IANS report mentioned.
The company had repeatedly assured its users, including parents that they could delete voice recordings collected over internet through its Alexa voice assistant and geolocation collected by the Alexa App.
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The company, however failed to fulfill its promises and kept some of the information for years and used the data unlawfully to improve its Alexa algorithm, according to the complaint.
The company has claimed that its Alexa service and Echo devices are “designed to protect your privacy” and that parents and other users can delete geolocation data and voice recordings.
Amazon retained children’s recordings indefinitely — unless a parent requested that this information be deleted, according to the complaint.
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“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.”
Even when a parent sought to delete that information, the FTC said, Amazon failed to delete transcripts of what kids said from all its databases.
The FTC said the company failed to put in place an effective system to ensure that it honoured users’ data deletion requests and to give parents meaningful notice about deletion.
