Incident 556: Amazon Allegedly Violated Children's Privacy through Default Voice Collection Settings

Description: Amazon's retention of children' voice recordings indefinitely as the default setting reportedly to train Alexa's voice recognition for Alexa-enabled devices was charged by the FTC and DOJ to violate COPPA Rule.
Editor Notes: Edited to clarify that a charging decision has been reached and not a verdict or ruling.

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Alleged: Amazon developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Alexa children users.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
556
Report Count
4
Incident Date
2018-05-10
Editors
Khoa Lam, Sean McGregor
Applied Taxonomies
MIT

MIT Taxonomy Classifications

Machine-Classified
Taxonomy Details

Risk Subdomain

2.1. Compromise of privacy by obtaining, leaking or correctly inferring sensitive information

Risk Domain

  1. Privacy & Security

Entity

Human

Timing

Post-deployment

Intent

Intentional

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Incident Occurrence+3
FTC charges Amazon with privacy violations over Alexa and Ring cameras
FTC charges Amazon with privacy violations over Alexa and Ring cameras
11alive.com · 2023

WASHINGTON — Amazon will pay more than $30 million to settle alleged privacy violations involving its voice assistant Alexa and its doorbell camera Ring.

The Federal Trade Commission voted to file charges in two separate cases Wednesday tha…

Amazon to pay $30 million over alleged Alexa, Ring privacy violations
washingtontimes.com · 2023

WASHINGTON — Amazon will pay more than $30 million to settle alleged privacy violations involving its voice assistant Alexa and its doorbell camera Ring.

The Federal Trade Commission voted to file charges in two separate cases Wednesday tha…

FTC and DOJ Charge Amazon with Violating Children’s Privacy Law by Keeping Kids’ Alexa Voice Recordings Forever and Undermining Parents’ Deletion Requests
ftc.gov · 2023

The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice will require Amazon to overhaul its deletion practices and implement stringent privacy safeguards to settle charges the company violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act…

Amazon to Pay $25 Million to Settle Children’s Privacy Charges
nytimes.com · 2023

Amazon agreed on Wednesday to pay a civil penalty of $25 million to settle federal charges that it kept sensitive information collected from children for years, including their precise locations and voice recordings, in violation of a child…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
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