Amazon Alexa Violates Children’s Privacy

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Most people worry about big brother watching, but what about big sister listening? Amazon is taking a financial hit because of privacy issues with its smart speaker. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently fined Amazon for violating consumers’ privacy.

What did Amazon’s Alexa do? How much was the fine? And if you have an Alexa, how do you protect yourself and, more important, your children’s privacy?

Privacy in the Constitution

The U.S. Constitution never directly addresses an American’s right to privacy. It’s touched upon in the Bill of Rights.

There are some protections in the First Amendment for privacy of beliefs and the Third Amendment for privacy against housing soldiers. Privacy is also indirectly addressed in the Fourth Amendment for privacy against unlawful searches and seizures. And finally, the Ninth Amendment is sometimes cited, although vague, with general privacy protection.

Children’s Online Privacy Rule

Although the Bill of Rights may not directly address privacy concerns for adults, children have been granted, by law, online privacy protections.

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) prohibits “unfair or deceptive acts or practices” in collecting, using or disclosing children’s personal information online. A child is defined as an individual 13 or under.

Because of COPPA, the FTC took a hard look and acted against Amazon.

FTC Goes Up Against Amazon Alexa

A cloud-based voice service, Amazon Alexa acts as a virtual assistant. It can play audio, control your smart home, answer questions, and act as your personal shopper. Anyone can use it, and that includes children.

Alexa stores your data and voice recordings. Amazon claims to do this to improve accuracy. But users are supposed to be able to delete these recordings by telling Alexa to delete them; the user can say, “Alexa, delete everything I’ve said.”

But the FTC lodged a complaint and, consequently, a lawsuit against Amazon Alexa. The FTC alleged that Amazon engaged in unfair, deceptive practices by telling consumers that Alexa was private, and it allowed users to exercise control over how sensitive information was collected and retained. The reality of Alexa’s information collection and storage violated Section 5 of the FTC Act and the COPPA Rule.

FTC Complaints Against Alexa

There were four specific complaints against Amazon Alexa. The main complaint was unfair privacy practices toward children. Alexa failed to delete children’s personal information and audio recordings. This violated the COPPA rule.

Other unfair privacy practices included insulating geolocation data from consumer deletion requests. Amazon Alexa also continued to use data for product improvement purposes even when the user requested the information be deleted.

Deceptive representations regarding access and deletion of voice recordings was also a complaint. According to the FTC, Amazon kept written transcripts of voice recordings after the audio files were deleted. Children’s audio files were retained.

The children’s audio files were retained because a child’s speech pattern differs from an adult’s. Amazon found the recordings useful as a training dataset for the algorithm.

Amazon Alexa also failed to apply deletion requests to housed data at secondary storage locations. The company continued to use data for product and algorithm improvements.

Amazon Fined for Violating COPPA Rule and FTC Act

As a result of the lawsuit, Amazon settled for $25 million. The settlement also included Amazon being required to delete inactive child accounts and some recordings and geolocation data. Prohibitions are now in place to stop Amazon from using data to train the algorithm.

How to Protect Children’s Privacy From Alexa

If you choose to use Alexa, there are ways to protect your children. You can go to the Alexa app on your smartphone or tablet to put controls in place. Go to settings, then Alexa privacy. You’ll then go to manage your Alexa data. Then go to “How long to save recordings” and select “don’t save recordings”; hit “confirm.”

You can also turn off the option to improve Alexa through your recordings, interest-based ads and the option for Amazon to use Alexa messages to improve transcription. You should disable voice purchasing as well. This will keep your children from ordering without your knowledge.

You can also verbally delete data. Amazon is required to delete the user’s data when a request is made.

Amazon Alexa Parental Controls

There are parental controls available. A kid-friendly Echo, in animal designs, is available. You can go to parents.amazon.com to set up parental controls. Options include daily time limits and filtering age-appropriate content.

But a child’s profile must be set up to take advantage of the controls. You'll be consenting for Amazon to collect data about your children.

What Does the Amazon Lawsuit Mean to Parents?

Parents should be on the lookout for Amazon updates explaining the “retention and deletion practices.” And Amazon is required to delete data when parents make a request.

Amazon will also create a privacy program targeted at protecting geolocation data.

The $25 million doesn’t go toward the parents or children that were violated. Instead, it goes to the U.S. Treasury, as all COPPA penalties do.

If you have Alexa and children in the house, make it a point to protect them by deleting all their personal information. This goes for your information as well.

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