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{"id":33950,"date":"2023-06-01T22:36:59","date_gmt":"2023-06-01T22:36:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2023\/06\/01\/amazon-settles-with-ftc-for-25m-after-flouting-kids-privacy-and-deletion-requests\/"},"modified":"2023-06-01T22:37:00","modified_gmt":"2023-06-01T22:37:00","slug":"amazon-settles-with-ftc-for-25m-after-flouting-kids-privacy-and-deletion-requests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2023\/06\/01\/amazon-settles-with-ftc-for-25m-after-flouting-kids-privacy-and-deletion-requests\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon settles with FTC for $25M after \u2018flouting\u2019 kids\u2019 privacy and deletion requests"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source:https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2023\/05\/31\/amazon-settles-with-ftc-for-25m-after-flouting-kids-privacy-and-deletion-requests\/<\/a><\/br>
\nAmazon settles with FTC for $25M after \u2018flouting\u2019 kids\u2019 privacy and deletion requests<\/br>
\n2023-06-01 22:36:59<\/br><\/p>\n

\n

Amazon will pay the FTC a $25 million penalty<\/a> as well as \u201coverhaul its deletion practices and implement stringent privacy safeguards\u201d to avoid charges of violating the Children\u2019s Online Privacy Protection Act to spruce up its AI.<\/p>\n

Amazon\u2019s voice interface Alexa has been in use in homes across the globe for years, and any parent who has one knows that kids love to play with it, make it tell jokes, even use it for its intended purpose, whatever that is. In fact it was so obviously useful to kids who can\u2019t write or have disabilities that the FTC relaxed COPPA rules<\/a> to accommodate reasonable usage: Certain service-specific analysis of kids\u2019 data, like transcription, was allowed as long as it is not retained any longer than reasonably necessary.<\/p>\n

It seems that Amazon may have taken a rather expansive view on the \u201creasonably necessary\u201d timescale, keeping kids\u2019 speech data more or less forever. As the FTC puts it:<\/a><\/p>\n

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Amazon retained children\u2019s recordings indefinitely \u2014 unless a parent requested that this information be deleted, according to the complaint. And even when a parent sought to delete that information, the FTC said, Amazon failed to delete transcripts of what kids said from all its databases.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Geolocation data was also not deleted, a problem the company \u201crepeatedly failed to fix.\u201d<\/p>\n

This has been going on for years \u2014 the FTC alleges that Amazon knew about it as early as 2018 but didn\u2019t take action until September of the next year, after the agency gave them a helpful nudge<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That kind of timing usually indicates that a company would have continued with this practice forever. Apparently, due to \u201cfaulty fixes and process fiascos,\u201d some of those practices did continue until 2022!<\/p>\n

You may well ask, what is the point of having a bunch of recordings of kids talking to Alexa? Well, if you plan on having your voice interface talk to kids a lot, it sure helps to have a secret database of audio interactions that you can train your machine learning models on. That\u2019s how the FTC said Amazon justified its retention of this data.<\/p>\n

FTC Commissioners Bedoya and Slaughter, as well as Chair Khan, wrote a statement accompanying the settlement proposal and complaint to particularly call out this one point:<\/p>\n

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The Commission alleges that Amazon kept kids\u2019 data indefinitely to further refine its voice recognition algorithm. Amazon is not alone in apparently seeking to amass data to refine its machine learning models; right now, with the advent of large language models, the tech industry as a whole is sprinting to do the same.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s settlement sends a message to all those companies: Machine learning is no excuse to break the law. Claims from businesses that data must be indefinitely retained to improve algorithms do not override legal bans on indefinite retention of data. The data you use to improve your algorithms must be lawfully collected and lawfully retained. Companies would do well to heed this lesson.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So today we have the $25 million fine, which is of course less than negligible for a company Amazon\u2019s size. It\u2019s clearly complying with the other provisions of the proposed order that will likely give them a headache. The FTC says the order would:<\/p>\n