German Justice Minister Katarina Barley | John MacDougall/AFP via Getty Images German justice minister takes aim at Amazon over Alexa Katarina Barley calls voice recording practices ‘unacceptable.’

German Justice Minister Katarina Barley, who's running in the European Parliament election, urged Amazon to respect Europe's data protection rules or face fines, in an interview published Friday.

"The recording of voice commands due to an unclear and vague wording in the privacy policy is unacceptable," the lead candidate of the Social Democratic Party list told the Handelsblatt, referring to the company's voice assistant Alexa.

In early April, Bloomberg reported that Amazon employees listened to voice recordings by users of Amazon's Alexa to help improve the software algorithms.

"Those who offer such products must guarantee the highest possible data protection and security standards," Barley said. "Infringements must be stopped immediately."

Under the General Data Protection Regulation, companies face fines up to 4 percent of their global annual turnover if they are found to infringe Europe's privacy rules.

“We take the security and privacy of our customers’ personal information seriously. We only annotate an extremely small number of interactions from a random set of customers in order improve the customer experience," an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.

It's not the first time Barley has taken aim at a Silicon Valley company. In January, Barley replied to one of Mark Zuckerberg's apology sprees by stating "Facebook is not aware of the real issues."

The German minister, who recently said she doesn't use Facebook's WhatsApp messaging app, questioned the relevance of owning voice assistants in the first place.

"In the end, every user has to ask himself if he really wants to have a specific digital application in his house," she said.