A proposed class-action lawsuit has been filed in B.C. Supreme Court against Amazon, alleging that its Alexa home technology collects users' personal data and sends it to the company for commercial purposes, including training artificial intelligence.
Joseph Stoney's lawyers, Charney Lawyers Professional Corp. of Toronto, filed the claim on July 15 against Amazon.com, Inc.; Amazon.com Services LLC; and Amazon.com.ca ULC. The lawsuit raises concerns across multiple Canadian provinces.
The claim states that Amazon made explicit privacy commitments to Alexa users but failed to obtain meaningful consent for the collection and retention of their data. It argues that Amazon Canada's notifications about data use lacked sufficient detail for informed consent.
The lawsuit asserts that most class members would not have signed up for Alexa if they had known the extent of data collection, its indefinite retention, and Amazon's use of the data for its own purposes.
“Had they learned about this after signing up for Alexa, users would have discontinued their accounts,” the claim said.
Instead of protecting user privacy, the claim alleges Amazon indefinitely kept data from Alexa, used it to train its algorithms, machine learning programs, and AI, and failed to fully delete the data when customers requested deletion of such data.
“This claim seeks to vindicate the rights of class members to privacy as well as their rights under the various provincial consumer protection acts,” said the claim.
The proposed class action includes all Canadian residents with an Alexa user account on or before July 19, 2023.
The suit explains that since 2014, Amazon has developed and sold Amazon "Echo" devices, which are controlled by its cloud-based voice assistant, Alexa. Alexa can activate intentionally or accidentally, the claim said.
“Once Alexa begins streaming audio to the cloud, that audio is transcribed to text, which is processed by an algorithm that instructs the Alexa system how to respond to the user,” the claim said.
“Once the request has been processed and responded to (or dismissed as a false wake), a copy of the audio file, the transcription, the resulting instructions to Alexa, and any associated metadata is stored in an Amazon database.”
The claim states that prior to 2020, users had no way to delete Alexa interaction-related data, and it was stored indefinitely. While Amazon introduced a deletion feature in 2020, the lawsuit alleges that as of July 19, 2023, Amazon only deleted the audio file, retaining the transcription, instructions, and associated metadata.
“When a user chose to delete the data on one or more of their interactions with Alexa, Amazon changed what was visible to the user so that it appeared that the interactions had been completely deleted even though Amazon was actually retaining everything except the audio file,” the claim said.
What is at issue?
The claim asserts Amazon profited from this data by training its algorithms and machine learning systems. It also alleges Amazon used the data and associated metadata to create user profiles for more effective targeted advertising.
The lawsuit points to Amazon Canada's privacy notice, which stated the company used personal information to operate, provide, develop, and improve products and services.
It also references the "Alexa, Echo Devices, and Your Privacy" page, which told users “we use your requests to Alexa to train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems using machine learning.”
“Training Alexa with real-world requests from a diverse range of customers is necessary for Alexa to respond properly to the variation in our customers' speech patterns, dialects, accents, and vocabulary and the acoustic environments where customers use Alexa,” the claim said the site said.
None of the allegations have been tested in court.
U.S. Injunction
The claim notes that in May 2023, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a complaint against Amazon, alleging the company falsely represented that Alexa app users could delete voice recordings, transcripts and metadata. Instead, Amazon allegedly only deleted voice recordings, keeping transcripts and associated metadata.
On July 19, 2023, Amazon and the FTC entered into an injunction order where Amazon agreed to pay a US$25-million fine and "effectively admitted to a number of instances of unlawful data misuse."
The claim seeks certification of the class action and declarations that Amazon breached its contracts with class members and breached their privacy.
It further seeks declarations that the company violated business practice and privacy laws.
“As a consequence of Amazon's breach of confidence, class members are entitled to damages,” the claim said. “Amazon should be required to disgorge the financial gains it realized from the breach of confidence.”
A response from Amazon was not received by deadline.
The suit has not been certified yet. A judge would need to approve it before the class action could move forward.
