If Amazon employees or hackers accessed personal footage from your Ring camera without your consent, you might be entitled to a hefty payout.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is issuing $5.6 million in refunds to certain Ring customers after it found that employees and contractors were unlawfully accessing private video content to use for algorithm training and other internal purposes.
Amazon-owned Ring was also accused of not implementing proper security protections to prevent hackers from accessing users’ accounts and footage without their consent.
“These practices led to egregious violations of users’ privacy,” the FTC said in Thursday’s notice.
In June 2023, Amazon settled two privacy-related suits with the FTC, one related to Ring and one stating that it violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Rule (COPPA Rule) with its Alexa voice assistant. Amazon was ordered to pay more than $30 million in civil penalties and customer refunds.
“While we disagree with the FTC’s claims regarding both Alexa and Ring, and deny violating the law, these settlements put these matters behind us,” Amazon said in a statement to Entrepreneur at the time.
The FTC said it will divide the $5.6 million into roughly 117,044 PayPal payments to customers who owned certain types of Ring devices during the alleged unauthorized use. Affected customers must redeem their PayPal payments within 30 days.
Related: Police Can No Longer Request Ring Camera Footage From Amazon
Amazon did not issue a statement on this week’s matter but told the Associated Press that affected customers were notified if their data had been “exposed in a third-party, non-Ring incident” by hackers. The company did not comment on the allegations of employees and contractors accessing customer data.
Amazon was up over 71% year over year as of Friday afternoon.
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