Amazon saved children's voices recorded by Alexa even after parents asked for it to be deleted. Now it's paying a $25 million fine.
businessinsider.com
Amazon saved children's voices recorded by Alexa even after parents asked for it to be deleted. Now it's paying a $25 million fine.::"For too long, Amazon has treated children's sensitive data as its own property," Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, said in a statement.
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This isn't entirely correct, the $25M fine is a slap on the wrist sure, but this is a COPPA ruling, which essentially means it's a $25M slap on the wrist and a "delete the data and change the way you're doing shit now or else". Nobody has gotten to the "or else" with COPPA afaik, but you'd essentially be risking daily fines until fixed and risk losing operating rights in the US entirely. Would that actually happen to Amazon? We'll never know, because they're going to fix it before they get there. Not worth the risk.
This is a win. Not every ruling has to bankrupt a company, changing how they operate through legal process is a good thing. This is how regulation is formed.
Fair enough, good reply.
Upvoted :)
(Maybe Lemmy will bring back some good discussions in threads like these...)
I think the public gets fatigued when we hear about the profits these companies make and then we see these comparatively small fines.
If this is how we "steer the vessel of regulation" then I can accept that this is a push in a better direction.
However, I still feel that a fine in the hundreds of millions, ( not bankrupting but a "shot in the leg" versus a "slap on the wrist"), is appropriate for these very large corporations. They already weild so much political and economic power that consequences for things like this should be higher.
In other words, let's encourage them to operate responsibly in the first place.
Yeah it's definitely not satisfying, heads will never roll, but it is progress! Better than a "Woops, sorry for dumping billions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, here's some pocket change, we'll do it again next week" at least.
Now the question is whether that progress is fast enough to keep up with a changing tech landscape, at the moment I don't think so. We're still arguing about data privacy, governments don't have the balls to even start tackling misinformation at the source, and generative AI is a whole other beast that regulators have barely started talking about.