Amazon Echo Show Kids Edition

Surprise! It’s another Amazon product. If you’ve ever looked at your kids and thought “why doesn’t Amazon have more data about them,” fear not. Bring home an Amazon Echo Show and you’ll have a camera pointed right at your children for them to love and enjoy.

The Echo Show is a essentially a smart speaker with a screen you can use to make video calls, watch YouTube, cruise around the web, and control smart home products. The kids version of the device comes with a number of perks for families, like a complimentary year of Amazon Kids+, which includes a ton of free content, parental controls, and bonus skills for Alexa. But according to Mozilla, it might not be worth the privacy tradeoff.

Cameras: Yes

Microphones: Yes

Location tracking: Yes

What data it collects: Your kid’s name, date of birth, gender, email, phone number, voice and video recordings, IP address, location, browsing history, Alexa search requests, music streaming data, video streaming data, podcast streaming data, smart home device usage, purchase history

Can you delete the data: Mozilla says it’s not clear whether you can delete the data in all locations.

How the company uses the data: Advertising, sharing data with third parties, combining information with data from third parties, improving Alexa

Mozilla says:

“With Amazon for Kids products, Amazon hopes to collect data on your child with your parental consent… They use this information on your child to, among other things, provide personalized offerings and recommendations. Yes, they’re learning about your child to target your child with more stuff they’ll want you to buy. They do say they won’t serve third-party interest-based ads when your kids are using an Amazon child profile. So that’s something.”

Mozilla’s review:

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/amazon-echo-show-kids-edition/