Amazon Kids

Is Amazon Kids safe?

As a place to put a young child in front of a screen, Amazon Kids is one of the tighter options. The paid Kids+ catalogue has no ads, no in-app purchases and no links out, and the parent controls are more detailed than on most tablets. We score it 61/100, ahead of Amazon Alexa (57) and behind YouTube Kids (69).

What drags it down is not the content but the company's handling of children's data. In 2023 Amazon paid a $25 million civil penalty after the FTC and the Department of Justice said it kept children's Alexa recordings indefinitely and undermined parents' deletion requests. The services named in that case are the Alexa side of Amazon Kids.

What did the FTC case cover?

The complaint, filed in Seattle in May 2023, lists three products Amazon launched for children in 2018: the Echo Dot Kids Edition speaker, a free service called "FreeTime on Alexa" that lets parents control what a child can do with Alexa, and a paid subscription, "FreeTime Unlimited on Alexa", with audiobooks and "kid skills". FreeTime was the earlier name of Amazon Kids, and Amazon's own bug bounty still lists the FreeTime app. The complaint says more than 800,000 children had their own Alexa profiles, with name, birth date and gender.

The government's case was that Amazon kept those children's voice recordings and transcripts, used them to improve Alexa, and did not fully delete them when parents asked, even though it told parents they could delete their child's data at any time. Amazon agreed to pay $25 million. The order requires it to delete inactive child Alexa accounts and bars it from using voice and location data that people asked to delete to build or improve its products.

Amazon's current children's privacy disclosure, updated in April 2026, says that without parental consent it may process a child's voice to answer a request but will not store the recordings. It also promises no interest-based ads on a child profile. What it does not give is a retention period: child data is kept "as long as it is required" for the stated purposes. Amazon does delete child profiles that have been inactive for more than 18 months.

Kids versus Kids+: what your child actually sees

The free Amazon Kids profile is a container. A parent shares books, videos and apps from their own Amazon library, sets an age filter and decides whether the child can use the web. Kids+ adds a subscription catalogue for ages 3 to 12, which appears on its own once the device is online.

The difference matters for safety:

• Kids+ content has no ads, no in-app purchases and no links to outside websites or social media, according to Amazon's help pages.
• Apps a parent adds may contain ads, though Amazon says the child's ability to interact with them is reduced, and in-app purchases are blocked unless the parent enables them.
• Web browsing can be limited to Amazon-curated sites or opened up with filtering. In the open mode, Amazon says, ads may appear on websites, but the child can only click through to other allowed sites.
• Calls and messages from a child profile reach parents and parent-approved contacts on compatible Alexa devices, and only with the parent's approval.

Since 10 March 2025 the Kids+ app is no longer in the App Store or Google Play, and its apps and games only run on Fire tablets and Fire TV. On a phone or iPad, Amazon Kids is now mostly a remote control for Amazon's own devices.

What the Parent Dashboard collects

The Amazon Kids Parent Dashboard app, rated 18+ on the App Store because it is for adults, has no "Used to Track You" section on Apple's label. It links name, email, phone number, user and device IDs, product interaction and diagnostics to the parent, and uses email and phone number for Amazon's own marketing.

Security is a stronger point. The Parent Dashboard app, the older FreeTime app and Fire, Echo and Kindle devices all sit in the Amazon Vulnerability Research Program on HackerOne, which pays bounties. Signing up to the dashboard sends a one-time code to the phone number on the Amazon account. We found no breach of Amazon Kids data. 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 the parent's Amazon account, which controls everything, stays optional.

How to set up Amazon Kids safely

1. 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 before creating any child profile.
2. In the Parent Dashboard, keep web browsing on Amazon-curated content for young children, and add single sites rather than opening the filtered web.
3. Leave in-app purchases blocked, and check each app you add from your own library for ads.
4. On Echo devices, review the voice recording settings in the Alexa app and set recordings to delete automatically.
5. Use the dashboard's activity view weekly. It shows titles your child opened, which is the quickest way to spot something that slipped past the age filter.

How we scored it

Scams and harmful content (78) is the strongest factor, because Kids+ content is closed, ad-free and free of purchases. Security (68) reflects Amazon's paid bug bounty covering the dashboard and devices. Privacy (48) is low because Amazon collects voice, location and activity with no fixed retention, and the regulatory record (50) reflects the $25 million penalty that names FreeTime on Alexa.