If Amazon employees or hackers you have accessed personal footage from your Ring camera without your consent, you may be entitled to a substantial compensation.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is issuing $5.6 million in refunds to some Ring customers after finding that employees and contractors were illegally accessing private video content to use for algorithm training and other internal purposes.
Ring, owned by Amazon, has also been accused of failing to implement adequate security protections to prevent hackers from accessing users’ accounts and footage without their consent.
“These practices have resulted in serious violations of user privacy,” the FTC said in Thursday’s notification.
In June 2023, Amazon settled two privacy-related lawsuits with the FTC, one related to Ring and one claiming it violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Rule (COPPA) with its Alexa voice assistant. Amazon was ordered to pay more than $30 million in civil penalties and refunds to customers.
“While we disagree with the FTC’s claims regarding both Alexa and Ring and deny violating the law, these settlements put these matters behind us,” Amazon said in a statement to Entrepreneur at the moment.
The FTC said it will split the $5.6 million into approximately 117,044 PayPal payments to customers who owned certain types of Ring devices during the alleged unauthorized use. Affected customers must redeem PayPal payments within 30 days.
Related: Police can no longer request ring camera footage from Amazon
Amazon did not release a statement on the matter this week, but told the Associated press that affected customers were notified if their data had been “exposed in a third-party, non-Ring incident” by hackers. The company has not commented on allegations of employees and contractors accessing customer data.
Amazon was up more than 71% year over year as of Friday afternoon.