Amazon tells you they'll delete your voice recordings when you ask. The US government found they kept children's recordings forever, even when parents specifically asked them to delete them. They also kept written copies of what you said after claiming to delete the audio.
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Amazon says your Echo only listens when you say the wake word. Researchers found it regularly records and sends audio to Amazon's servers when triggered by TV shows and normal conversation — without anyone saying "Alexa". Amazon also removed the option to keep your voice recordings off their servers.
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You bought a smart speaker to play music and set timers. The app it requires can read all your text messages, send texts on your behalf, and access your entire contact list. Amazon's privacy page doesn't clearly explain why a speaker needs to read your texts.
Amazon was caught keeping your children's voice recordings forever, even when you asked them to delete them. They paid $25 million in fines. But their current privacy policy still says they keep your child's recordings to 'improve services' — which is exactly what got them in trouble before.
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Amazon says Alexa only listens when you say the wake word. But the Alexa app you must install on your phone asks to read your text messages, see your contacts, make phone calls, track your location in the background, and access your camera. That's way more access than needed to control a kids' speaker.
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Amazon promises Alexa only activates when it hears the wake word. But security researchers found you can control Alexa with sounds too high-pitched for humans to hear — hidden in YouTube videos or video calls. So someone could secretly command the speaker in your child's room through content your child is watching.
Parents told Alexa to delete their kids' recordings. Amazon said OK -- then kept the transcripts and the AI models trained on children's voices. The delete button was a lie. In May 2023, the FTC fined Amazon $25 million for violating children's privacy law. The FTC's words: "Amazon's hollow promises are not good enough." Amazon also kept children's geolocation data indefinitely -- where your kid was, when, for how long. The same week, Amazon paid another $5.8 million for Ring privacy violations. $30.8 million in fines in one week. The FTC ordered Amazon to delete the children's data AND destroy the AI algorithms trained on it. Your child's voice was training Amazon's AI. The delete button just hid it from you.
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Amazon sells Drop-In as a way to "check in on your kids." Here's how it works: anyone with permission can instantly listen to and speak through any Echo in your home. No ringing. No acceptance. The only signal is a green light that a child might not notice or understand. Domestic abuse organizations have flagged Drop-In as a surveillance tool used by abusive partners. Place an Echo in a room. Listen from anywhere, anytime, from your phone. Amazon didn't build an intercom. They built a surveillance feature and marketed it as parenting. Every room with an Echo is a room someone can listen to without warning. Amazon calls this "connecting with family." Abuse organizations call it what it is.
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In January 2026, a ceramics studio owner in California started getting Amazon orders for products she'd never listed on Amazon and never agreed to sell through it. Amazon's AI had scraped her website and was taking orders on her behalf — using her photos, her pricing, and her inventory data, all without asking. She had to email Amazon to opt out of a programme she'd never opted into. That same month, Amazon was in federal court suing Perplexity AI for doing essentially the same thing to Amazon's own product listings. Amazon called Perplexity's behaviour unauthorised scraping. Amazon called its own behaviour a customer convenience feature.
Amazon knows exactly what you read, when you read it, how fast you read each page, what you highlight, and what you search for. Your Kindle is not a private reading device — it is a reading surveillance device that reports your entire reading life back to Amazon.
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Your Kindle reading app asks to track your precise location. Why does a book-reading app need to know where you are? Amazon can tell not just what you read, but where you were when you read it.
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Even if you pay extra to remove ads from your Kindle, the advertising tracking code is still built into the device. Amazon embeds ad tracking in every Kindle, whether you paid for the "ad-free" version or not.
Amazon says the Echo Show is designed to protect your privacy, but the companion app demands access to your text messages, phone calls, contacts, and background location — capabilities that go far beyond controlling a smart display.
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Amazon promises you can delete your voice recordings and control your data, but the FTC caught them keeping children's recordings forever — even after parents asked them to delete them. Amazon was fined $25 million. They also removed the option to keep voice recordings off their servers entirely.
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Amazon says face recognition data stays on your device, but the Echo Show constantly communicates with Amazon's servers and keeps logs of when it detects people. The camera must stay on all the time for these features to work, meaning it's continuously watching your home.
Amazon promised you could delete your children's voice recordings, but the government found they kept those recordings forever — even after parents asked them to delete. Fire TV uses the same Alexa system. Amazon was fined $25 million for this, and 30,000 employees could listen to recordings without any reason.
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The Fire TV app says it needs microphone access for voice commands, which sounds reasonable. But Amazon was caught keeping every voice recording forever, letting thousands of employees listen to them, and using children's recordings to train AI — all while telling users they could delete this data.
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Amazon says it listens to what you're watching just to avoid showing you the same ad twice. But independent reviewers found the device collects your location, voice recordings, racial and demographic data, shopping history, and shares it all with advertisers and Amazon's other companies. "Fewer repetitive ads" is a massive understatement of what's actually happening.
Amazon promised that the intimate photos you took in your underwear for body fat scanning would be deleted from their servers automatically. But the FTC caught Amazon keeping kids' voice recordings forever despite similar deletion promises with Alexa. There's no proof the body scan photos were actually deleted as claimed.
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Amazon said your voice recordings for mood analysis never leave your phone. But the app has permission to record audio AND send data to the internet in the background, plus it contains advertising trackers. There's nothing technically stopping the app from sending your voice data to Amazon's servers despite their promise.
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Amazon said they'd never use your health data for advertising. But the Halo app itself contains Amazon's own advertising tracker and requests access to your advertising ID — the identifier used to target you with ads across different apps. If health data truly wasn't used for marketing, why include ad trackers in a health app?
In 2021, Black and LGBTQ+ Twitch streamers were bombarded with coordinated hate raids — thousands of bots flooding chats with racial slurs and death threats. Streamers RekItRaven, ShineyPen, and LuciaEverBlack organized #ADayOffTwitch, taking thousands of streamers offline. A class-action lawsuit was filed. Twitch's response? Months to implement basic anti-raid tools like phone verification. A platform owned by the world's largest cloud computing company couldn't stop bot accounts from sending the N-word in chat.
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In October 2021, a hacker dumped 125 gigabytes of Twitch's internal data on 4chan with the hashtag "#DoBetterTwitch." It wasn't a sophisticated attack — it was a server misconfiguration. The leak included Twitch's entire source code, internal security tools, and an unreleased Steam competitor codenamed "Vapor." Evidence from a 2014 breach — right after Amazon bought Twitch — was still visible, suggesting Twitch never fully cleaned up from the first hack. The attacker called it "part one." Amazon's response: "we're confident no credentials were exposed." The source code was.
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The 2021 Twitch leak exposed exactly how much every single creator earned. CriticalRole: $9.6 million. xQc: $8.4 million. Summit1g: $5.8 million. But it wasn't just the millionaires — small creators making $200 a month had their income published alongside the top earners. The exposure triggered harassment campaigns, doxxing attempts, and stalking fears. Twitch's privacy policy promised creator financial data was confidential. A single server misconfiguration turned every streamer's bank statement into a 4chan post. Amazon, a $1.7 trillion company, couldn't configure a server correctly.
Watch a cooking show on Prime Video — Amazon recommends kitchen gadgets. Watch a documentary about anxiety — Amazon suggests supplements. Watch a pregnancy movie — baby products appear in your feed. Amazon is the only streaming service that can sell you what you just watched. Your viewing habits are a shopping signal, and Amazon connects every screen to your cart.
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You paid $139/year for Prime. That included ad-free streaming. Then Amazon added ads and charged you $2.99/month extra to remove them. 200 million people were downgraded overnight. The ad-free experience you paid for became a premium add-on. Amazon didn't add a cheaper tier — they made the existing tier worse and charged you to restore it.
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Amazon's ad business made $46.9 billion in 2023. Prime Video is now part of that machine. Unlike Google and Facebook, who guess what you want to buy, Amazon knows what you actually bought. Advertisers target you based on your real purchase history while you watch TV. The ads know what's in your cart. The most powerful ad targeting in history, playing between episodes.
Amazon sells a tablet for $60 and puts ads on the lockscreen. Pay $20 to remove them. Pre-installed Amazon apps cannot be deleted. No Google Play Store — only Amazon's app store. The tablet is cheap because you are the product. Every tap, every search, every video feeds Amazon's profile of you. The discount is the data collection fee.
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The FTC fined Amazon $25 million for keeping children's voice recordings after parents asked them deleted. Fire Kids tablets ship with Alexa built in — the same Alexa the FTC found violated COPPA. Amazon sells a tablet specifically for children, preloaded with software that was fined for illegally retaining children's data. That is the product design.
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Your Fire Tablet tells Amazon what you read, what you watch, what you search, what you browse, what apps you open, and how long you use them. This feeds into the same profile as your shopping cart, your Alexa commands, and your Ring camera. One $60 device contributes to the most detailed consumer profile any company has ever assembled.
Amazon tracked one user's Kindle activity across 90,000 recorded interactions — every tap, every page turn — and uses it to target ads. Turning off Reading Insights hides the dashboard but does not stop the data collection.
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Kindle privacy settings are split across multiple menus, and even after opting out, Amazon keeps all the reading data already collected — your 90,000 interactions stay on Amazon's servers indefinitely.
Amazon already has your shopping data, your voice (Alexa), your doorbell (Ring), and your viewing habits (Prime Video). Now they want to be your internet provider too. Project Kuiper gives Amazon control of the pipe itself. From satellite to router to smart speaker to shopping cart — one company, end to end, orbit to checkout.