Amazon.com Inc. will pay more than $30 million to settle two separate lawsuits brought by the Federal Trade Commission, it was reported today.

One of the lawsuits, brought by both the FTC and Justice Department, accused the company of collecting data on children who had spoken with its virtual assistant Alexa. It was alleged that Amazon did not delete the data, including geolocation data, which violated Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Rule, or COPPA Rule.

“Amazon’s history of misleading parents, keeping children’s recordings indefinitely, and flouting parents’ deletion requests violated COPPA and sacrificed privacy for profits,” said Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “COPPA does not allow companies to keep children’s data forever for any reason, and certainly not to train their algorithms.”

Amazon had said that it needed the data to help Alexa respond to voice commands since children’s voices are unique. The law requires any company to ask for permission from parents of children under 13 before collecting data, and the parents should be able to ask for the data to be deleted. The lawsuit challenged that Amazon had not deleted data even after requests from parents.

The company denied it had violated the law but said the settlement means it can “put the matter” to rest. Amazon added, “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.”

Amazon’s doorbell camera unit Ring was also hit with a fine for privacy violations, this time for $5.8 million. The company was accused of allowing employees to have access to videos collected by the app and not putting enough security mechanisms in place to prevent hacking.

The FTC charged Amazon with the illegal surveillance of its customers by its own staff. In some cases, said the complaint, Amazon had allowed third-party contractors to access the data.

At the same time, Amazon used it to train its algorithms without asking the customers for their consent, said the complaint. The security issue was another matter. The FTC said Amazon had been warned about lax security and failed to act on it, which resulted in hackers exploiting the videos of about 55,000 U.S. customers.

Again, Amazon denied it was in the wrong, offering a statement on the Ring’s website about its actions. The company said it disagreed with both Ring allegations but settled so it could move on.

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