By Evan Rosen, New York Daily News
Amazon reached two settlements with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday, totaling more than $30 million for privacy violations from its Ring doorbell cameras and Alexa voice assistant devices.
The company agreed to pay $5.8 million for failing to protect video footage recorded from customers’ Ring cameras, and $25 million for Alexa products violating a children’s privacy law, reports CNN.
Details of the Ring lawsuit were shared in a filing with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The FTC claimed that Ring offered employees unfiltered access to sensitive video data recorded by customers, and failed to stave off hackers from gaining access to their systems.
“As a result of this dangerously overbroad access and lax attitude toward privacy and security, employees and third-party contractors were able to view, download, and transfer customers’ sensitive video data for their own purposes,” the FTC said.
One instance involved a single Ring employee viewing thousands of video recordings from roughly 80 female users over the course of several months in 2017.
The employee, who was eventually fired, reportedly searched for cameras situated in “intimate” places, such as “Master Bedroom,” and used them to spy on women in their own homes.
The agency also claimed that Ring prioritized growth in a way that made the product vulnerable to hackers. Occasionally, outsiders were able to gain access to cameras and use the device’s two-way communication system to “harass, threaten and insult individuals,” the lawsuit said.
The $25 million related to the ‘Alexa’ settlement stems from a children’s privacy law called COPPA, which prohibits the collection of personal data from children under 13, unless parental consent is given.
The FTC alleged that Amazon stored children’s voice recordings “indefinitely,” unless users directly instructed the company to delete the recordings. The agency claimed that, occasionally, Amazon failed to honor deletion requests “and instead retained that data for its own potential use.”
With the new Alexa settlement, Amazon will be required to delete recordings and geolocation data based on past consumer requests, including those related to children.
The company also agreed to notify consumers about the FTC settlement, and will halt the training of its algorithm based on data obtained using these practices.