Amazon has agreed to pay a total of A$47.4 million to settle claims it allowed its employees free access to private Ring video recordings and improperly retained children’s Alexa voice recordings.

The Federal Trade Commission filed the complaint, which alleged one Ring employee viewed “thousands of video recordings of female users of security cameras that surveilled bedrooms and other intimate spaces in their homes”.

Ring also failed to protect Ring users from two separate hacks, despite repeated warnings of vulnerabilities from media outlets, employees, and third-party security firms.

Amazon agreed to pay US$5.8 million to settle the Ring complaint, the FTC said, as well as a US$25 million penalty for retaining voice and geolocation data from minors in violation of the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

“Today’s settlement sends a message to all those companies: Machine learning is no excuse to break the law,” the FTC said.

Amazon said in a statement: “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.

“As part of the settlement, we agreed to make a small modification to our already strong practices, and will remove child profiles that have been inactive for more than 18 months unless a parent or guardian chooses to keep them.”