Alexa, sue Amazon: tech giant faces class action over voice recordings

Users of Amazon’s Alexa are clear to pursue a class action over allegedly illegal recordings of private conversations. In Seattle, U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik ruled that users meet the legal threshold to sue in a nationwide class action for monetary damages, and a court order to stop the alleged violations.

A report from Reuters identifies the case in question as Kaeli Garner v. Amazon.com, U.S. District Court, Western District of Washington, filed in 2021. It is being brought on behalf of users who registered one or more Alexa devices, Amazon’s AI personal assistant device that is supposedly activated with a “wake word” or key phrase.

Plaintiffs say their Alexas recorded bits of billions of conversations, “beyond commands aimed at Alexa,” without their knowledge, and that Amazon violated state consumer protection law by failing to disclose the retention and use of voice biometrics for commercial gain. They are seeking a court order that would force Amazon to destroy any existing recordings and related data.

“Sometimes Alexa begins streaming when a wake word was not, in fact, used,” says the suit. “These events are called ‘false wakes.’”

“Plaintiffs assert that both the permanent storage of Alexa interactions and the false wakes are intentional design elements of the service, used to amass huge numbers of voice recordings that can be fed into algorithms and machine learning platforms for continuous improvement training.”

The judge says the scale of the violation makes a class action suitable.

“The fact that millions of people were allegedly injured by the same conduct suggests that representative litigation is the only way to both adjudicate related claims and avoid overwhelming the courts,” says Lasnik’s statement.

Amazon has declined to comment, but has previously denied any wrongdoing in the lawsuit and said it built Alexa with safeguards to prevent accidental activations that could lead to noncompliance on biometrics laws.

Article Topics

Amazon  |  biometric data  |  biometrics  |  data privacy  |  lawsuits  |  voice biometrics