Amazon to pay $31 million over privacy violation in Alexa and Ring Camera lawsuits

Amazon is to pay $ 25 million civil penalties to settle the allegations that it violated the child privacy law. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleged that Amazon had deceived the parents by keeping the child's voice and location data by its voice assistant.

The FTC said that Amazon did not delete the kids voices when the parents asked and hence the commission had to intervene to make Amazon delete inactive child accounts as well as certain voice and geolocation data.

In a separate lawsuit, the company will pay $5.8 million as customer refunds for alleged privacy violations involving its doorbell camera Ring. The doorbell company allegedly let employees and contractors access consumers' private videos and provided lax security practices that enabled hackers to take control of some accounts.

Amazon bought California-based Ring in 2018 and the violations as alleged by the FTC predate the acquisition. As per Mint, Amazon said it disagreed with the FTC's claims on both Alexa and Ring and denied violating the law. But it said the settlements “put these matters behind us."