The Federal Trade Commission has found that Alexa, Amazon’s personal voice assistant technology, violated a federal law meant to protect kids.
Federal regulators on Wednesday announced Amazon would pay $25 million to settle allegations that its voice assistant Alexa violated a federal law protecting children’s privacy — a sign of Washington’s mounting scrutiny of the e-commerce giant’s sprawling businesses.Regulators said Wednesday that Amazon failed to delete children’s recordings and location information, in some cases before mid-2019 retaining transcripts parents specifically directed Alexa to erase.
By recording children and using transcripts of those recordings to improve its product even after deletion requests, the U.S. government alleges that Amazon has violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, a law that has recently been enforced against other popular tech companies including Fortnite-maker Epic Games and YouTube.The commission is also fining the company over Ring, Amazon’s home surveillance company best known for its doorbell camera.
“Machine learning is no excuse to break the law,” said commissioner Alvaro M. Bedoya, in a statement joined by FTC Chair Lina Khan and commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. “Claims from businesses that data must be indefinitely retained to improve algorithms do not override legal bans on indefinite retention of data.”
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