What your smart speaker keeps about your child

A smart speaker in a family room hears children, and the two big platforms handle that differently by default. Amazon saves Alexa voice recordings unless you change the setting, with an 18-month retention. Google’s voice and audio activity setting is off unless you turn it on, so audio is not saved to the account by default. Both are worth checking rather than assuming.

Why voice retention is worth ten minutes

In May 2023 the FTC and Department of Justice charged Amazon with violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act over Alexa. The complaint was not that recordings existed — it was that Amazon kept children’s voice recordings and transcripts indefinitely, and undermined parents who had asked for deletion, retaining transcripts tied to the child’s account by persistent identifier. Amazon paid $25 million and was ordered to delete children’s voice and geolocation data and overhaul its deletion practices.

That is the useful context for a parent: the controls below exist and work, but the default is not neutral, and “I asked it to delete” has not always meant what a parent assumed it meant.

Amazon Alexa and Echo

1. In the Alexa app, open Settings › Alexa Privacy › Review Voice History. Filter by date range, by device, or by profile — the profile filter is how you see what has been recorded under a child’s voice profile specifically.
2. Listen to a handful. This is the step that changes minds, because it shows what the device actually picked up rather than what you assumed it did.
3. Go to Settings › Alexa Privacy › Settings › Alexa Data and choose the retention: keep recordings for 18 months, keep for 3 months, or Don’t save recordings.
4. If you choose “Don’t save”, allow up to 36 hours for it to take effect, and note that it also deletes previously saved recordings.
5. Remember transcripts are separate: they remain reviewable for 30 days before automatic deletion, and can be deleted sooner from Voice History.

Google Assistant, Nest and Gemini for Home

• The voice and audio activity setting is off unless you turn it on. If you never opted in, audio recordings of your family are not being saved to the Google account.
• Home history older than 18 months is auto-deleted by default. You can change that to 3 or 36 months, or turn auto-delete off entirely, from the activity settings.
• Review and delete at myactivity.google.com or in the Google Home app. You can also say “Hey Google, delete what I said this week.”
• Voice Match can be turned off per home or per device if you would rather the speaker did not recognise individual family members at all.

What the deletion controls do not cover

• Deleting recordings does not change what the assistant will answer or play. Those are content settings — see the Alexa and Google Assistant guides.
• A speaker in a child’s bedroom is a scheduling question as much as a privacy one, and the assistant’s own Do Not Disturb usually has to be set separately from any phone-based downtime.
• Apple’s HomePod works through Apple Account and Family Sharing rather than these controls; see the HomePod guide.

If the wider worry is what devices around the house collect, the family privacy audit walks through it room by room.