FTC readies children’s privacy case against Amazon

The Justice Department has 45 days to bring a case once it is referred. If it declines, the FTC can proceed on its own.

An FTC spokesperson declined to comment. It could not be learned whether the FTC is interested in settling the case, and the company declined to comment. The company previously said it is in compliance with COPPA, and that its Amazon Kids offering for Alexa requires parental consent and gives parents full control over their children’s use of the product.

Much of the attention on the FTC’s investigations of Amazon has been focused on a yearslong antitrust probe of every part of the company’s business, and President Biden’s hard-charging FTC chair, Lina Khan, first gained international prominence with a legal paper outlining an antitrust case against the tech giant.

However, the agency has several ongoing consumer protection investigations into the company, including for potential privacy and data security violations in its Ring camera and home security business.

Financial penalties under COPPA are limited to just over $50,000 per violation, though each affected person is considered a separate violation and the total number can add up quickly for a company the size of Amazon.

The details of the FTC’s COPPA case couldn’t be learned. However, in 2019, a group of consumer and digital rights organizations filed a complaint with the FTC over a version of the company’s Echo Dot smart speaker geared toward kids. Among the allegations, the groups claim Amazon doesn’t properly provide notice to parents on the exact information collected by children using the device, and makes it too difficult to delete data, including transcripts of kids’ interactions with the devices.