Amazon to pay $30M in FTC penalties for spying on customers trends now

Amazon has agreed to pay more than $30 million to settle privacy complaints filed by US regulators, including claims that a Ring employee spied on female customers for months through cameras in their bedrooms and bathrooms.

The Federal Trade Commission leveled the claims in two separate complaints filed on Wednesday, saying that lapses related to Alexa and Ring devices violated privacy laws and consumer protections.

Amazon agreed to pay a $25 million civil penalty to settle the Alexa-related action, alleging that it deceived parents by Alexa recordings of kids' voice and location data for years, even after requests to delete them.

In the Ring-related action, Amazon will pay $5.8 million in consumer refunds, after the FTC said employees used the security cameras to peep on women, and failed to prevent hackers from commandeering the devices. 

'It's really disturbing,' Elisa Jillson, the FTC's lead attorney on the two cases, said of the allegations in an interview with KUTV. 

In a statement to DailyMail.com, Amazon said that it disagreed with the FTC's claims regarding both Alexa and Ring and denied violating the law. But it said the settlements 'put these matters behind us.'

'At Amazon, we take our responsibilities to our customers and their families very seriously,' the company said. 'Our devices and services are built to protect customers' privacy, and to provide customers with control over their experience.'

The Ring complaint alleges that Amazon's home security camera subsidiary 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 many of the violations alleged by the FTC predate the acquisition.

In one case, a Ring employee spied on at least 81 female customers between June and August of 2017, according to the complaint.

'The employee focused his prurient searches on cameras with names indicating that they surveilled an intimate space, such as 'Master Bedroom,' 'Master Bathroom,' or 'Spy Cam,'' the complaint alleged.

The incident came to light when a female co-worker reported the activity to a supervisor, who initially brushed off viewing the videos as a normal part of the engineer's job, according to the complaint.

Only when the supervisor learned the peeping was focused on 'pretty girls' did he escalate the matter, the FTC said.

The court filing describes a second incident in January 2018, in which a male Ring employee used his broad access rights to spy on a female colleague through her videos.