Amazon to Pay $25 Million to Settle Children’s Privacy Charges

Under the terms of the proposed settlement agreement, Amazon would be required to delete children’s voice recordings and precise location data as well as inactive Alexa accounts belonging to children. The proposed agreement also prohibits Amazon from misrepresenting how it handles users’ voice recordings, precise location data and children’s data.

A federal court must approve the settlement order.

The Amazon case comes at a moment of heightened public concern over how some prominent social networks, video game services and device makers treat their younger users. It highlights intensifying efforts by the Federal Trade Commission to force large tech platforms to bolster protections for sensitive information, like precise location or personal health details, whose disclosure could pose privacy or physical risks to adult consumers and children.

Last December, Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, agreed to pay $520 million to settle accusations by the F.T.C. that it had illegally harvested data from players under 13 and, separately, steered millions of users to make unwanted payments. In 2019, Google agreed to pay a $170 million penalty to settle charges from the F.T.C. and the attorney general of New York that it had violated children’s privacy on YouTube.

The intensifying regulatory push to protect children online is not limited to the United States. Last September, Irish regulators announced they would levy a fine of about $400 million against Meta for its handling of children’s information on Instagram. Meta said it disagreed and planned to appeal.

In a separate case on Wednesday, the F.T.C. accused Ring, the home security camera service, of committing “egregious violations” of users’ privacy, saying that privacy and security failures at the company had enabled employees to illegally snoop on customers and allowed hackers to hijack users’ accounts.

Regulators said that Ring, which Amazon acquired in 2018, had “unreasonable” data security and privacy practices from at least 2016 through January 2020.

In 2017, for instance, one Ring employee viewed thousands of videos belonging to dozens of female customers, including in sensitive locations like the women’s bedrooms and bathrooms, the agency said in a legal complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.