BBC Alexa skills privacy notice

Your trust is very important to us. This means the BBC is committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal data. 

It is important that you read this notice so that you are aware of how and why we are using such information. This privacy notice describes how the BBC (“we”, “us”) collects and uses personal data about you when you use BBC Skills on Amazon Alexa, for example, the BBC’s collection of data about what you’ve played, and how many times you used our Alexa Skills each week. You should also read about how Alexa works and how Alexa uses your personal data independently of the BBC.

We collect some personal data about our users, like you. It's our job to tell you how we collect your personal data, how we record it, and how we use it. In this notice, you will see different names or terms used that you may not be familiar with, such as:

  • Data controller: This person (or group of people, like us) is in charge of the personal information we collect about you.
  • Data processor: This person processes your personal information for the data controller.
  • Personal data: This means any information that can be used to identify someone, such as a name, email address, date of birth, or how a person uses BBC Skills (such as which music, stories you listen to).

Why do we collect and use your personal data?

We will only collect your personal data when we need it to help us do our job and allow you to use BBC Skills. 

When we've collected it, here's how we use your personal data:

  • For analytics, such as to understand how many people have used BBC Skills (if this service is a good use of the license fee); to help us improve BBC Skills experience.
  • Your listening history may be attributed to your BBC account profile which enables us to personalise your experience of the services provided by the BBC.

What personal data do we collect?

If you are signed into a BBC account, the categories of personal data that we collect, store and use when you interact with the BBC Skill include the following:

  • Device identifiers – When you use BBC Skills, Amazon passes us a unique code that identifies your device. This identifier is further disguised by the BBC when we use it for analytics purposes. This makes sure that any data the BBC handle is kept as safe as possible.
  • Session information - When you use BBC Skills, we temporarily store information about the content you are listening to allow you to resume the content later. This data is stored for two weeks.
  • User activity – This refers to your interactive experiences, such as the music, radio podcast and news stories you listen to, when you pause or resume something, or when you skip, or ask for more details on a news story. When you use BBC Skills, we temporarily store the fact that you have used the skill to enable us to control which promotions or help messages that you hear. This data is stored for one year.

If you use BBC Skills without signing into a BBC account, the categories of personal data that we collect, store and use when you interact with the BBC Skills remains the same, except they will not be associated with the BBC account profile.

Who looks after your personal data?

We (the BBC) are the data controllers of the personal data we collect from you – that means we are responsible for how and why your personal data are collected and used when you use BBC Skills.

We've got a good reason for using your personal data (the law calls it the ‘lawful basis for processing'), because that needs to happen for you to get the benefits from using BBC Skills, and we've made sure your rights are protected. The lawful basis for this processing is BBC’s ‘legitimate Interest’, we have a legitimate Interest to process your personal data in order to provide you with the BBC Skills service.

How long will we keep your personal data? 

Your personal data collected via BBC Alexa Skills will be retained in accordance with this Privacy Notice. If you delete your BBC account, your personal detail (such as name, email address, postcode, gender, year of birth) in your account will be permanently deleted. Your user activity data will be anonymised. 

Do we share your personal data?

The BBC works with our approved third-party providers who help us to provide some of our services. These partners only process your personal data on behalf of the BBC and not independently of the BBC. We currently use a third-party data analytics provider and a third-party data storage provider to deliver BBC Skills service.

Amazon may also access and analyse your use of BBC Skills and to the extent that any of that information is personal data, Amazon are an independent data controller of that personal data. You can find out more by reading Amazon’s Privacy Notice and you can see more details in Amazon's Terms of Use.

What are your rights?

You and your parents (if you are under 13 years old) have the right to:

  • Be told how we use your personal data.
  • Ask to see the personal data we hold.
  • Ask us to change personal data you think is wrong.
  • Ask us to remove personal data when it's not needed anymore.
  • Ask us to only use your personal data in certain ways.
  • Tell us you don't want your personal data to be processed.

The BBC can only help with your request if the information we hold in our system can identify you.

More information

If you have any questions about how we handle your personal data, or you wish to find out about your rights, please visit the BBC's Privacy and Cookies Policy.  This notice applies if there are any differences between this notice and the BBC’s Privacy and Cookies Policy. 
 
You will also be able to find out more information about how we process your personal data and how you can contact the BBC Data Protection Officer

If you have a concern about the way the BBC has handled your personal data, you can raise your concern with the supervisory authority in the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) https://ico.org.uk/.

Updating this privacy notice

We will revise the privacy notice if there are significant changes to how we use your personal data.