United States of America: Announced FTC public lawsuit against Amazon’s Ring over alleged violations of privacy and security requirements

On 31 May 2023, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a public lawsuit and injunction order against Ring, a home security camera company owned by Amazon, over alleged violations of privacy and security requirements, which resulted in the prejudice of its customers’ privacy. According to the FTC, Ring failed to restrict employees' and contractors' access to consumers’ private videos and enabled various hacking attacks by not implementing privacy and security protection measures. The FTC proposes an order, which is subject to approval by a federal court, to mandate that Ring deletes data products derived from videos it unlawfully accessed. Additionally, Ring must establish and enforce a privacy and security program. Moreover, the proposed order stipulates that Ring must pay USD 5.8 million, which will be allocated for consumer refunds. Furthermore, any customer videos and face embeddings obtained by the Ring prior to 2018 must be erased. The proposed order also requires Ring to promptly inform the FTC of any unauthorised access or exposure of customers' videos and notify consumers about the FTC's actions.