Amazon fined for violating children’s privacy
Thirty million dollars fine ad Amazon by the US Federal Trade Commission. While the number seems sizable for the e-commerce giant, which posted more than $3 billion in first-quarter earnings, they’re small. These are actually two separate fines: the first of 25 million is the more serious given that it violated the privacy of children by not deleting the recordings of Alexa at the request of the parents and kept them longer than necessary.
Another 5.8 million fine was handed down due to the behavior of a former employee of his Ring camera unit who spied on female clients for months with cameras placed in bedrooms and bathrooms.
The first accusation is very serious given that the company would have prevented parents from deleting their children’s voice and geolocation data acquired with Alexa. The reports made use of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Rule which “doesn’t allow companies to keep children’s data forever for any reason, and certainly not to use it to train algorithms.” The company obviously denied any wrongdoing but agreed to pay. Also because in this way he was able to “train” Alexa very well, and for free, to speak fluently with children.
Unlimited access to Ring video data
In the second case the FTC stated that Ring, i.e. the intercom with smartphone control and access management proposed by Amazon, has granted employees unlimited access to sensitive video data of customers. In May 2018, an employee provided information about a customer’s recordings to her ex-husband without consent while in another case, an employee was found to have given Ring devices to people and then watched their videos without their knowledge.
The commissioner of the FTC Alvaro Bedoya told to Reuters that the need for tech companies to collect data is no excuse to break the law. The FTC is also reviewing Amazon.com’s $1.7 billion deal to purchase iRobot Corp (house cleaning robots) which was announced in August 2022 .
In Italy a fine of 1 billion
In Italy, Amazon has already received a much heavier fine from the Antitrust, of over 1 billion euros for abuse of its dominant position in logistics in 2021. “Amazon – wrote the Italian Antitrust – holds a position of absolute dominance in the market of intermediation services on marketplaces, which allowed it to favor its logistics service, called Amazon Logistics, with sellers active on the Amazon.it platform to the detriment of competing operators in this market and to strengthen its dominant position”.