The vastly popular Ring Video Doorbell is owned by Amazon. The FTC just hit Amazon with $5.8 million dollars in fines over PRIVACY VIOLATIONS.
Amazon’s flagship product, Alex was also hit with a fine. A whopping $25 million dollars over privacy.
Before we get into these stories. It is important to reinforce that YOUR VOICE, VIDEO AND TEXT ARE NOT PRIVATE. They are ALL collected…it is just how they are handled AFTER they are collected that are being addressed here.
The Federal Trade Commission 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 paying $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. So…you may ask….what about all the recordings AFTER 2018? No worries, you were forced to agree to revised privacy policy and terms of use after 2018 which gave Amazon permission to use your information LOL.
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.
Under the proposed settlement, Amazon will have to delete inactive child accounts as well as some voice recordings and geolocation information. It also would be prohibited from using that information to train its algorithms.
Both settlements must be approved by a court to take effect.
