Amazon Alexa

Is Amazon Alexa safe?

Alexa is reasonably safe to use if you treat your Echo as a microphone connected to Amazon's cloud and set it up accordingly. Its account and device security are solid, and Amazon gives you better tools than most rivals to delete what you have said. The weak points are how much Alexa learns about you and how Amazon has handled that data. In 2023 Amazon paid a $25 million civil penalty over children's voice recordings it kept indefinitely, and since March 2025 there has been no way to keep voice requests off Amazon's servers. We score Alexa 57/100, level with Ring at 57 and behind Google Home at 62.

What did the FTC find about Alexa and children?

In May 2023 the FTC and the Department of Justice charged Amazon with breaking the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. According to the FTC, Amazon kept children's voice recordings indefinitely unless a parent asked for them to be deleted, and used them to train Alexa's speech algorithm. Even when parents did ask, the FTC said, Amazon did not delete the text transcripts from all of its databases. It also said Amazon kept geolocation data from the Alexa app for years and told users they could delete voice and location data when that was not fully true.

Amazon agreed to pay a $25 million civil penalty, and the federal court in Seattle entered the order in July 2023. It requires Amazon to delete inactive child accounts and certain recordings and location data, bars it from using data that people asked to delete to train its models, and makes it run a privacy programme for location data.

The case sits alongside a separate one. A class action over how Alexa records and keeps voice data, Garner v. Amazon, has been running in the same court since 2021, and a judge certified a class in part in July 2025. That is a private lawsuit with no verdict yet, so we treat it as context, not as a finding.

Does Alexa record everything you say?

No. Amazon says Echo devices only listen on the device for the wake word, and nothing is stored or sent until they hear it. After that, the request and a fraction of a second before the wake word go to Amazon's cloud, where Alexa turns it into text and acts on it. Follow Up Mode lets you keep talking without repeating the wake word, and Amazon switches it on for compatible devices when you join Alexa+.

Two things matter more than the wake word. First, a small share of requests is heard by people: Amazon calls this supervised learning on "an extremely small sample" of interactions. Second, the option to keep audio on the device is gone. A setting called "Do Not Send Voice Recordings", available only on the 4th-generation Echo Dot, Echo Show 10 and Echo Show 15, was switched off on 28 March 2025. Amazon told owners that its generative AI features rely on the cloud.

Deleting recordings also has limits. Amazon's help page says deletion removes recordings, transcripts and typed requests, but it may keep records of the actions Alexa took, products you searched for and data held by third-party skills. Systems already trained on your data are not untrained when you delete it.

What does Alexa+ know about you?

Alexa+, the generative AI version, costs $19.99 a month or comes free with Prime, and is now open to all customers in the US and Canada. Amazon says it knows what you have bought, what you have listened to and watched, your shipping address and how you like to pay. You can also forward it emails, documents and photos to remember or act on.

That makes it more useful and more revealing. Apple's App Store label for the Alexa app already lists health data, precise location, contacts, audio, messages and "sensitive info" as linked to you. It also lists purchase history, search history and contact details as used for Amazon's own advertising and marketing. The label shows no tracking across other companies' apps, which is the one clear point in its favour.

On security, Amazon is stronger. The Alexa app and Echo devices are both in scope for the Amazon Vulnerability Research Program on HackerOne, which pays bounties, and we found no known breach of Alexa voice recordings. Two-step verificationTwo-factor authenticationSigning in with a second proof of identity on top of your password, such as a code from an app, a security key or a passkey.More in the glossary on your Amazon account is optional, though, and recordings are processed in the cloud rather than end-to-end encryptedEnd-to-end encryptionEncryption in which only the sender and the recipient can read a message. The company running the service cannot see its content.More in the glossary.

How to make Alexa more private

1. In the Alexa app, open More, then Alexa Privacy, and set recordings to delete after 3 months, or choose not to save them if you can live without Voice ID.
2. In the same menu, review how your recordings are used to improve Amazon's services and turn that off if you prefer.
3. Turn on two-step verificationTwo-factor authenticationSigning in with a second proof of identity on top of your password, such as a code from an app, a security key or a passkey.More in the glossary for your Amazon account, since it also controls your Echo devices, smart locks and cameras.
4. Press the microphone button on Echo devices in rooms where you hold private conversations, and turn on the audible tone that plays when audio is sent.
5. Think twice before sharing emails or documents with Alexa+, and remove skills you no longer use, because their developers keep their own copies of data.
6. For children, keep Echo devices with screens and calling in shared rooms and delete their recordings regularly.

How we scored it

Scams and harmful content (70) is Alexa's strongest factor, because there is no public feed, and security (66) comes next, with a paid bug bounty and no known breach of recordings. Privacy (42) is its weakest: everything goes to Amazon's cloud, a sample is reviewed by people, and the App Store label lists a long set of data linked to you and used for Amazon's ads. The regulatory record (48) reflects the $25 million penalty that names Alexa; Ring's FTC case and the Prime settlement count only on those pages.