Amazon will pay the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) more than $30 million to settle a pair lawsuits that allege the company violated users’ privacy through its Ring cameras and Alexa voice assistant.
Filed on Wednesday, one of the lawsuits brought by the FTC accuses Ring of unlawfully deceiving its customers over the privacy of their data and the videos collected by its products. According to the FTC’s complaint, Ring failed to restrict employees and contractors from accessing customer videos and used them to train algorithms without user consent.
In one example, a Ring employee allegedly viewed thousands of videos from at least 81 different female users from cameras labeled for use in intimate spaces, like “Master Bedroom,” “Master Bathroom” and “Spy Cam.” Between June and August 2017, the FTC alleged, the employee looked through the videos for often at least an hour a day on hundreds of occasions.
“Ring’s disregard for privacy and security exposed consumers to spying and harassment,” FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection director Samuel Levine said in a statement Wednesday. “The FTC’s order makes clear that putting profit over privacy doesn’t pay.”
Ring, which Amazon acquired in 2018, has agreed to pay $5.8 million and implement a new data security program, according to the proposed settlement. Ring is also 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 (COPPA) by illegally retaining thousands of children’s information through their profiles with the Alexa voice assistant. Amazon paid $25 million to settle that suit.
The Department of Justice (DoJ) filed the Alexa complaint and proposed settlement on behalf of the FTC. The government alleged that Amazon kept voice and geolocation information associated with young users for years while preventing parents from using their rights to delete their kids’ data under COPPA rules.
As part of 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.
In a statement to The Verge, Ring Spokesperson Emma Daniels said that the company did not deny the FTC’s claims but that the company “promptly addressed these issues on its own years ago, well before the FTC began its inquiry.”
“While we disagree with the FTC’s allegations and deny violating the law, this settlement resolves this matter so we can focus on innovating on behalf of our customers,” Daniels said.
