Amazon: Amazon denies duping US consumers over Alexa’s recording practices

E-commerce giant Amazon.com has asked a U.S. judge to throw out a multibillion-dollar consumer lawsuit that claims the tech company’s cloud-based voice service Alexa illegally collected and recorded private conversations without consent.

Amazon said in a federal court filing on Wednesday in Seattle that the consumers had failed after years of litigation to show it engaged in unfair or deceptive practices.

Amazon asked U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik to rule for the company on the merits of the plaintiffs’ claims, which would end the case before a trial.

“Plaintiffs’ Alexa recordings in fact contain none of the private, salacious, or personal details they claimed in their complaint,” Amazon told the court. The filing said the consumers “either knew or reasonably should have known how Alexa worked.”

Amazon and the plaintiffs’ lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday.

The lawsuit, filed in 2021, claimed Amazon violated state wiretap laws through its collection and storage of data from its Alexa voice-assistant software.

Amazon launched Alexa in 2014 as a virtual assistant that responds to a command prompt, or “wake” word, such as “hi, Alexa.” The consumers alleged Amazon developed Alexa “to illegally and surreptitiously intercept billions of private conversations” that extended beyond commands aimed at Alexa.

Amazon countered that its Alexa-enabled devices “monitor only for an acoustic pattern that matches the wake-word, and they do not activate until that pattern is detected.”

Amazon said there was no evidence that Alexa “ever captured any plaintiff’s ‘conversation’ or other communication.” It said it built Alexa with safeguards to prevent “accidental” activations.

Only a “tiny fraction” of Alexa recordings “undergo anonymized human review as part of Amazon’s machine learning processes,” Wednesday’s filing said. Amazon denied that concealed the role of human review from Alexa users.

The plaintiffs have asked Lasnik to approve two classes of consumers in the case made up of millions of individuals. They are seeking billions of dollars in damages.

The plaintiffs also want a court order restricting Amazon’s use of secret records and requiring it to destroy any related data.

The case is Kaeli Garner v. Amazon.com, U.S. District Court, Western District of Washington, No. 2:21-cv-00750-RSL.

For plaintiffs: Michael Canty of Labaton Keller Sucharow and Paul Geller of Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd

For Amazon: Jedediah Wakefield and Brian Buckley of Fenwick & West