Amazon Will Pay Millions in Settlements for Privacy Violations with Ring Cameras and Alexa Devices

While Amazon may not be the only company guilty of collecting private data with their devices on people of all ages without their consent

By B.N. Frank

While Amazon may not be the only company guilty of collecting private data with their devices on people of all ages without their consent, last month the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced the agency was taking legal action against it for this and perhaps other offenses as well.  Nevertheless, approximately two weeks later, the company started offering American developers the opportunity to also collect data on people without their consent.  Only time will tell if that opportunity will still be available now that Amazon must pay 30M+ to settle with the FTC.

From CNBC:

Amazon to pay over $30 million in FTC settlements over Ring, Alexa privacy violations

Lauren Feiner@lauren_feiner

Annie Palmer@in/annierpalmer/@annierpalmer

Key Points

• Amazon’s Ring doorbell unit will pay $5.8 million to settle with the FTC over privacy violations.

• Amazon will also pay $25 million to settle a separate privacy suit over Alexa.

Amazon will pay the Federal Trade Commission more than $30 million to settle allegations of privacy lapses in its Alexa and Ring divisions, according to filings on Wednesday.

The agency filed a lawsuit alleging Amazon’s Ring doorbell unit violated a portion of the FTC Act that prohibits unfair or deceptive business practices, which Amazon settled by agreeing to pay $5.8 million.

As part of the proposed settlement, Ring is required to delete any customer videos and data collected from an individual’s face, referred to as “face embeddings,” that it obtained prior to 2018. It must also delete any work products it derived from those videos.

A separate suit alleges Amazon violated the FTC Act and Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by illegally retaining thousands of children’s information through their profiles with the Alexa voice assistant. Amazon paid $25 million to settle that suit.

In addition to the flagrant privacy violations and security risks associated with installing and operating these types of devices in homes and everywhere else, “smart”, wireless, Bluetooth, and IoT devices also emit harmful electromagnetic and wireless radiation and manufacturers are required to warn users about this.  In fact, a U.S. federal court ruled in favor of organizations and petitioners that sued the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for NOT adequately protecting Americans from wireless radiation exposure (including 5G) in 2021.   More recently one of the organizations petitioned the agency to comply with the now almost two-year-old court-ordered mandate.  Organizations have also petitioned the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for “violating its own law” for NOT protecting Americans from wireless radiation exposure from electronic devices.

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