Amazon will pay $25m (£20m) for violating children’s privacy with its Alexa voice assistant, BBC news reports.

The company agreed to pay the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after it was accused of failing to delete recordings from Alexa at the request of parents after it was found to have stored sensitive data for years.

Ring Amazon will also pay a fine after giving its employees unfettered access to customer data.Ring will pay $5.8 million to authorities, according to a document filed in federal court in the District of Columbia.

However, the complaint alleges that the company failed to do so. It stored the data for years and used it illegally to improve Alexa’s algorithm.

In a statement, Samuel Levin, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, accused Amazon of “misleading parents, storing children’s records indefinitely, and disregarding parents’ requests for deletion.”

He added that the company “sacrifices privacy for profit.”

The FTC also said that Ring – which Amazon bought in 2018 – has allowed “thousands of employees and contractors” to monitor customers’ privacy records.

According to the FTC, they were able to view and download sensitive customer video data for their own purposes.
According to the complaint, one of the officers reviewed thousands of videos belonging to female users of Ring’s cameras, which “monitor intimate spaces in their homes, such as bathrooms or bedrooms.”

The employee was only stopped after his actions were noticed by a co-worker, the report said.

“While we disagree with the FTC’s allegations regarding Alexa and Ring and deny having violated the law, these settlements put these issues behind us.”

Amazon said.

The company added that it will continue to create more privacy features on behalf of customers.