@hackernews@die-partei.social

The lawsuit said the company sought to retain the data for "its own potential use," despite repeatedly assured its users that they could delete voice recordings collected from its Alexa voice assistant and geolocation information collected by the Alexa app.

Under the FTC's proposed settlement with Amazon, which must be approved by a federal court, the company would have to pay a $25 million civil penalty and delete inactive child accounts and certain voice recordings and geolocation information.

All of the videos were stored unencrypted on Ring’s network and could be downloaded, viewed, shared or disclosed by any employee or any contractor, "regardless of whether the employee or contractor actually needed that access to perform his or her job function," according to the complaint.

The complaint highlights one Ring employee who viewed "thousands" of recordings from 81 women, some of whom were other Ring employees, between June and August 2017.

What they're saying: "Ring's disregard for privacy and security exposed consumers to spying and harassment," said Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

"The FTC’s order makes clear that putting profit over privacy doesn’t pay," he added.

Ring and Amazon said in a statement to Axios that it disagreed with the FTC’s allegations and denied violating the law.

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#####By going after the popular Ring video doorbell service and Alexa, the agency can finally say it tackled parts of Amazon's grip on consumer data and tried to reel in a Big Tech player's means of surveillance.
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#####It would also have to alert the FTC about incidents of unauthorized access or exposure of customers’ videos.
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Too bad #eff staff don't follow me- I would be inclined to hear their perspective on the latter section.