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Originally Posted by haertig
Maybe Amazon has actually done something wrong here. But the article(s) do sound at least a little fishy. And the media reporting this is certainly not to be trusted. So I am officially neutral at this time. Until more information comes out and is verified (and reported accurately). At this point, I think Amazon may have done something wrong. Or they may not have. I don't normally defend Amazon. I have some of their products, but I am not a fan-boy. But this article, and all the other ones similar to it, sound a little fishy to me. I'm not sure we're dealing with the gospel truth or accurate reporting here...
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Man, everything you said sounds so common sense, I was nodding along with your points and agreeing with them. But then I went and read the article.
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Originally Posted by haertig
It's funny that all the articles I've recently seen on this insist on talking about the Ring camera thing. After they've put that in headlines, they have a byline far down in the article that says "The Ring violations were from before Amazon acquired the Ring company, and have since been corrected." But saying that up front doesn't really fit the agenda, so it's buried down much further in the article(s).
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From the article:
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In a separate lawsuit, the FTC seeks a $5.8 million fine for Amazon over claims employees and contractors at Ring — a home surveillance company Amazon bought in 2018 — had full access to customers' videos.
Amazon is also accused of not taking its security protections seriously, as hackers were able to break into two-way video streams to sexually proposition people, call children racial slurs and physically threaten families for ransom.
Despite this, the FTC says, Ring did not implement multi-factor authentication until 2019.
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Amazon bought Ring in 2018, new weaknesses existed and did not correct them until 2019. Additionally:
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In addition to paying the $5.8 million, which will be issued as customer refunds, Ring would have to delete customers' videos and faces from before 2018, notify customers about the FTC's actions and report any unauthorized access to videos to the FTC.
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So no. It has not been corrected.
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Originally Posted by haertig
The violations for keeping Alexa recordings say they are for "children's privacy". So evidently what is alleged to have been done is not a problem for adults.
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Right:
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The alleged practices would violate the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, which requires online companies to alert and obtain consent from parents when they gather data for children under age 13 and allow parents to delete the data at will.
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Originally Posted by haertig
I wonder how they expect Amazon to distinguish a "children's recording" from an "adult recording"?
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From the article:
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The FTC alleges Amazon held onto children's voice and geolocation data indefinitely, illegally used it to improve its algorithm and kept transcripts of their interactions with Alexa despite parents' requests to delete them.
Amazon would not be able to use data that has been requested to be deleted. The company also would have to remove children's inactive Alexa accounts
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