According to the FTC’s privacy settlement, Amazon Ring utilised to spy on customers.

Amazon Ring The Federal Trade Commission said in a court filing on Wednesday that a former employee of Amazon.com’s Ring doorbell camera unit spied on female customers for months in 2017 with cameras installed in bedrooms and bathrooms. The FTC announced a $5.8 million settlement with the company over privacy violations.

Amazon Ring

According to a court document in federal court in Seattle that revealed a separate settlement, Amazon also agreed to pay $25 million to resolve claims that it violated children’s privacy rights when it refused to delete Alexa recordings at the request of parents and stored them longer than necessary.

The FTC settlements are the organization’s most recent attempt to hold Big Tech responsible for practises that critics claim prioritise data collecting profits over privacy.

As part of its ongoing antitrust investigation into Amazon.com, the FTC is also looking into its $1.7 billion acquisition of iRobot Corp., which was announced in August 2022 as part of the company’s most recent push into smart home technology.

Amazon, which acquired Ring in April 2018, promised to alter some of its methods.

Amazon.com stated in a statement that while it disagreed with the FTC’s allegations relating both Alexa and Ring and denied breaking the law, the settlements “put these matters behind us.”

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The FTC said that Ring provided staff with uncontrolled access to customers’ private video data: “As a result of this dangerously overbroad access and lax attitude towards privacy and security, employees and third-party contractors were able to view, download, and transfer customers’ sensitive video data.”

An employee of Ring once watched recordings of at least 81 female customers and staff using Ring products in 2017. The FTC stated that “Undetected by Ring, the employee continued spying for months.”

The employee was ultimately fired after a coworker caught the misbehaviour, according to the FTC complaint.

According to the lawsuit, an employee unknowingly shared information about a customer’s recordings with the customer’s ex-husband in May 2018. In a different incident, an employee was discovered to have handed Ring devices to people and then secretly watched their footage, according to the FTC.

Ring is required by the FTC agreement, which has a 20-year expiration date, to tell customers how much access it and its contractors have to their data.

Ring’s standards were amended in February 2019 to require that most employees and contractors only have permission to view a customer’s private footage.

Alvaro Bedoya, commissioner of the FTC, told Reuters that the settlements should serve as a warning to internet companies that the necessity to collect data does not constitute a justification for breaking the law. This is sending them a very obvious message, he added.

The $30.8 million in fines only make up a small portion of Amazon’s $3.2 billion first-quarter profit.

The FTC said that Amazon.com had broken laws preventing deception of Alexa users and laws safeguarding children’s privacy in its case against the company filed in Washington state. For instance, according to the FTC complaint, Amazon promised consumers that it would remove voice transcripts and location data upon request but did not follow through.

“The unlawfully retained voice recordings provided Amazon with a valuable database for training the Alexa algorithm to understand children, benefiting its bottom line at the expense of children’s privacy,” the FTC stated.