What the Tech? FTC fines Amazon $25 million over Alexa recordings
By JAMIE TUCKER Consumer Technology Reporter
The FTC has fined Amazon $25 million because it says the company violated children’s privacy laws by keeping recordings from Amazon Alexa devices, even after parents asked for them to be deleted.
The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice also demand that Amazon overhaul its deletion practices and implement privacy safeguards.
You may know that Amazon Echo devices are always listening for the “wake” or trigger word when someone asks Alexa for information or to control smart home devices. What you may not know is that the devices record what’s being said even when it only thinks someone says the wake word.
Check it for yourself. Go into the Alexa app on a smartphone and tap “settings” and then “privacy”. There you’ll find “review voice history”.
By default, it will display all of the recordings for the day but you can change that to the last 30 days, or the entire history of voice recordings. You’ll likely see years’ worth of recordings, all saved on Amazon’s servers.
Look or listen to the labeled “audio could not be understood”. You may hear sounds from the TV, or part of a conversation. You can send feedback that Alexa did or did not do what you asked.
Amazon saves those recordings it says, to improve its functionality.
But do you really want Amazon to collect that data and save the recordings? You can delete the recordings by date, or all of them simultaneously.
If you’re concerned about this, you can disable the Echo’s microphone, though you’ll effectively make the device useless when you want to ask for help. And if you can also change the device’s trigger word to “computer”, “echo”, Amazon, or Ziggy.
I found using the name “Ziggy” significantly reduced the number of incidents when Amazon recorded my conversation.
Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection said “Amazon’s history of misleading parents, keeping children’s recordings indefinitely, and flouting parents’ deletion requests violated COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) and sacrificed privacy for profits.”
The FTC and DOJ call for Amazon to delete inactive child accounts and voice recordings along with geolocation information. The order must be approved by the federal court to go into effect.
