The FTC took Amazon Ring to task for compromising people’s privacy by giving employee and contractors unnecessary and unrestricted access to sensitive video information and failing to provide notice or consent for access, and failing to secure its devices from hacks. It was revealed that a single employee had spent several months in 2017 watching thousands of video recordings without consent, including many that occurred in “intimate spaces” of the home. Ring was ordered in 2023 to delete information, models, and algorithms derived from unlawfully viewed videos and implement a privacy and security program with stringent controls. 

Meta was forced pay $1.4 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by the Texas Attorney General alleging that the company had covertly captured biometric information from Facebook users without their knowledge or consent. The settlement also requires the company to halt the “practice of capturing and using the personal biometric data of millions of Texans without the authorization required by law.” This settlement is the largest to stem from Meta’s photo facial recognition feature, but it is not the only one, with the company also settling a class action in Illinois for $650 million involving the same practices. A similar Texas state biometric privacy lawsuit against Google is ongoing.  

Amazon had to pay $25 million dollars for improperly collecting children’s voice recordings and  geolocation information through its Alexa devices, misleading parents about privacy protections, and failing to honor deletion requests. The DOJ and FTC took action against Amazon for violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. In addition to the monetary settlement, Amazon must also delete inactive child accounts, stop using certain sensitive information to train its algorithms, stop misrepresenting its privacy policies, and notify its users about the FTC-DOJ action.