Structural risks
These risks apply to every Amazon product. They are legal obligations and corporate
practices that individual products cannot override. A subsidiary cannot opt out of an
FTC consent decree. A company cannot selectively ignore its home country's intelligence
law for one product. These risks set a grade floor of
D — no Amazon product
can score better than this, regardless of its own privacy settings.
critical
PRISM participant since 2014
2014-01-01
Amazon joined the PRISM programme. As a major cloud provider (AWS), the scope of potential access extends beyond consumer products to infrastructure hosting other companies' data.
high
$25M COPPA + Alexa violation
2023-05-31
Amazon paid $25 million to settle FTC charges that Alexa retained children's voice recordings indefinitely and used them to train algorithms, violating COPPA and the FTC Act.
high
Cross-subsidiary data sharing (Ring, Alexa, Shopping)
2019-01-01
Amazon shares data across Ring, Alexa, Prime, and its advertising business. Ring footage is accessible to Amazon employees and has been shared with law enforcement without user consent.