Amazon Echo (Alexa) VS DJI Mini 4 Pro
Verdict DROP IT DROP IT
The Reality The FTC and Department of Justice found Amazon violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by retaining children's Alexa voice recordings indefinitely -- keeping them for years -- and undermining parents' actual deletion requests: even when a parent asked Amazon to delete a child's data, the company failed to delete transcripts of what the child had said from all of its internal databases. Amazon agreed to pay a $25 million civil penalty in May 2023 and is now required to overhaul its deletion practices, delete inactive children's Alexa accounts, and implement new privacy safeguards around geolocation data. US regulators reached a different formal conclusion. Under the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, Congress required a national-security review of DJI; when no agency completed it by the December 23, 2025 deadline, the law's automatic consequence triggered -- the FCC was directed to add foreign-produced drones and related components, which covers DJI, to its Covered List as posing an unacceptable national-security risk. In practice, this blocks new FCC equipment authorizations for new DJI drone models going forward, though it does not retroactively ban previously authorized drones already owned by consumers, and the Commerce Department has separately signaled plans for rules that could restrict Chinese drone imports further. DJI has disputed the underlying security characterization throughout this process.
SHORT ANSWER
Amazon Echo (Alexa): The FTC and DOJ found Amazon retained children's Alexa voice recordings indefinitely and failed to honor parents' deletion requests across its systems, resulting in a $25 million COPPA settlement in 2023 and a mandated overhaul of its deletion practices.
DJI Mini 4 Pro: DJI has consistently denied its drones pose a security risk, but as of December 2025 the US government formally added foreign-made drones, including DJI's, to the FCC's Covered List as an unacceptable national-security risk, blocking new model authorizations going forward.