Amazon Fire TV with Alexa Voice Remote

We ding this product for using personal data for targeted advertising purposes, and combining data about you with data it receives from third parties for targeted advertising purposes.

Amazon combines data on its users with data from third parties, for advertisement purposes: "Some third-parties may provide Amazon pseudonymized information about you (such as demographic information or sites where you have been shown ads) from offline and online sources that we may use to provide you more relevant and useful advertising."

"In the twelve months prior to the effective date of this Disclosure, Amazon has not sold any personal information of consumers, as those terms are defined under the California Consumer Privacy Act. "

"Information about our customers is an important part of our business, and we are not in the business of selling our customers' personal information to others."

"The personal information that Amazon disclosed to the third parties identified in the “Does Amazon Share Your Personal Information?” section of the Amazon Privacy Notice about consumers for a business purpose in the twelve months prior to the effective date of this Disclosure fall into the following categories established by the California Consumer Privacy Act, depending on which Amazon Service is used:
- identifiers such as your name, address, phone numbers, or IP address, for example if we use a third party carrier to deliver your order;
- personal information, such as a credit card number, for example if we use a third party payment processor;
- your age, gender, or other protected classifications, for example if you choose to participate in a survey distributed by a survey provider;
- commercial information, such as the details of a product or service you purchased if a third party service provider is assisting to provide that product or service to you;
- internet or other electronic network activity information, such as if we use a service provider to help us gather crash reports for analyzing the health of our devices and services;
- geolocation data, such as providing a delivery partner the location of your vehicle in order to deliver a package if you use Amazon Key;
- audio or visual information, for example if a service provider reviews recordings of customer service phone calls for quality assurance purposes, or if we use a service provider to fulfill your order to print images from your Amazon Photos account;
- education information, for example coursework you may direct us to share with the operator of an educational Alexa skill; and
- professional information, for example if we provide your account details to a service provider for verification as part of enrollment for an Amazon Business account."

Amazon says they do not sell your personal information. They combine your voice data with third-party data to answer your requests as well as to train Alexa's speech recognition. You can choose to not save any voice recordings, but it will cost you some features.

While voice recordings won't be used for ad personalization, the transcripts of recordings, and the list of actions that Alexa did in response to your voice commands, may be.

We ding this product for not guaranteeing all users have the same right to access and delete their data, regardless of where they live.

For users outside of California and Europe, Amazon is not clear if they can excercise their deletion rights: "In addition, to the extent required by applicable law, you may have the right to request access to or delete your personal information. If you wish to do any of these things, please contact Customer Service. Depending on your data choices, certain services may be limited or unavailable."

A user can chose to not send voice recording to the Cloud: "On supported devices, you can turn on Do Not Send Voice Recordings, so the audio of your requests to Alexa (for example, “Alexa, what’s the weather?”) will be processed on device and not sent to the cloud. A text transcript of your request will be sent to the cloud so Alexa can respond to your request. You will be able to review and delete those transcripts in your Voice History. Alexa will still send audio to the cloud for features that require the transmission of audio, such as when you make a call or send a message or announcement via Alexa. And, if you create a voice ID, the audio recordings used to teach Alexa your voice will be sent to the cloud. Alexa will also send audio to the cloud if you enable Alexa Guard, including for Smart Alerts and emergency calling with Guard Plus."

You can review and delete your voice recordings, one by one, by date range, or all at once. You can also set up an auto-deletion to automatically delete recordings older than 3 or 18 months. You can choose to not save any voice recordings, at the cost of some features. If you choose not to have any voice recordings saved, the text transcripts of your requests will be still retained for 30 days, after which they will be automatically deleted.

Retention details:
"When you delete voice recordings associated with your account from Voice History, we will delete the voice recordings that you selected and the text transcripts of those recordings from Amazon’s cloud. If you choose not to have any voice recordings saved, the text transcripts of your requests will be retained for 30 days, after which they will be automatically deleted. We retain those text transcripts to allow you to review the requests you make to Alexa in your Voice History, and to improve your Alexa experience and our services. You can delete the text transcripts at any time in the Alexa app by going to Settings > Alexa Privacy > Review Voice History.

We may still retain other records of your Alexa interactions, including records of actions Alexa took in response to your request. This allows us, for instance, to continue to provide your reminders, timers, and alarms, process your orders, remember the things you've taught Alexa, and show your shopping and to-do lists and messages sent through Alexa Communications. If your request was processed by an Alexa skill, deleting your voice recordings does not delete any information retained by the developer of that skill (skill developers do not receive voice recordings)." This is problematic, because a big share of more than 100,0000 skills are developed by third parties that are not necessarily bound by Amazon’s privacy policies. The research by North Carolina State University found that "23.3% of 1,146 skills that requested access to privacy-sensitive data either didn't have privacy policies or their privacy policies were misleading or incomplete. For example, some requested private information even though their privacy policies stated they were not requesting private information." In addition to misleading privacy policies, issues included things like developers being able to claim fake identity ('Samsung', 'Apple'), multiple skills sharing the same Alexa trigger words, etc. "