'Amazon's history of misleading parents, keeping children's recordings indefinitely, and flouting parents' deletion requests violated COPPA and sacrificed privacy for profits,' said Samuel Levine, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, in a statement. The company also would have to remove children's inactive Alexa accounts and be required to notify its customers about the FTC's actions against the company.

In addition to the $25 million civil penalty, Amazon would not be able to use data that has been requested to be deleted. 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.

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. In one lawsuit, the Federal Trade Commission claims the tech company violated privacy laws by keeping recordings of children's conversations with its voice assistant Alexa, and in another that its employees have monitored customers' Ring camera recordings without their consent. Amazon will pay more than $30 million in fines to settle alleged privacy violations involving its voice assistant Alexa and doorbell camera Ring, according to federal filings.

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