In 2020, 126 million speakers were sold in the world.
It is expected that by 2024 8.4 billion assistants will be used.
Alexa was born in 2014 by Amazon, an eCommerce giant.
Technology is found in any part of our lives, especially in our homes where there are various devices. With that, a report indicated that some 30,000 Amazon employees could spy on voice recordings of Alexa users.
As detailed by Bloomberg News, Amazon paid $25 million to settle federal charges that tens of thousands of its employees had access to voice recordings of Alexa users captured by the smart device’s speakers.
In that sense, and according to said information, the US regulators made the accusation in a complaint filed by the Federal Trade Commission that resulted in the agreement of 25 million dollars.
Following that investigation, the FTC claimed that 30,000 Amazon employees were able to listen to Alexa customer recordings between August 2018 and September 2019.
So the FTC alleged that Amazon “maintained sensitive voice and geolocation data for years, and used it for its own purposes, while putting the data at risk of harm from unnecessary access.”
Amazon was accused of violating a children’s privacy law and misleading parents by keeping children’s voice and location data recorded by Alexa for years.
“Amazon’s record of misleading parents, keeping children’s recordings indefinitely and disobeying parental removal requests violated COPPA and sacrificed privacy for profit,” said Samuel Levine, chief consumer protection officer at Amazon. the FTC, in a statement.
So, being the 1998 law, it is designed to protect children from harm online and “will have to delete inactive children’s accounts and certain voice recordings and geolocation information and will be prohibited from using such data to train its algorithms.” ”.
In that sense, the commissioner of the FTC, Álvaro Bedoya, said in a statement that “when parents asked Amazon to remove their children’s Alexa voice data, the company did not remove it completely.”
In response, an Amazon spokesperson told The Post: “At Amazon, we take our responsibilities to our customers and their families very seriously.”
“We built Alexa with strong privacy protections and customer controls, designed Amazon Kids to comply with COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act), and collaborated with the FTC before expanding Amazon Kids to include Alexa,” the spokesperson added. in your statement.
The spokesperson also went on to explain that “as part of the agreement, we agreed to make a small modification to our already strong practices and will remove profiles of children who have been inactive for more than 18 months, unless a parent or guardian decides to keep them.”
Amazon said last month that it has sold more than half a billion Alexa-enabled devices worldwide and that usage of the service increased 35 percent last year.
Technology companies have been raising investigations for their products on various continents, especially in the United States and the European Union, where various regulators continue to take care of millions of users.
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