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Blocked from Amazon Alexa for a week after racism accusation by delivery driver
- foogazi 3y ago> Due to this experience, I am seriously considering discontinuing my use of Amazon Echo He’s still using it ?
- HKH2 3y agoYou think he can quit cold turkey?
- candiddevmike 3y agoThe onion couldn't have written this better. As if you needed anymore of a reason not to use cloud-connected home automation components.
- clouddrover 3y ago> "I have a smart home" I don't think you do.
- mattmillr 3y agoThe primary source is his blog post linked in the article: https://medium.com/@bjax_/a-tale-of-unwanted-disruption-my-week-without-amazon-df1074e3818b https://medium.com/@bjax_/a-tale-of-unwanted-disruption-my-w...
- mensetmanusman 3y agoI wonder if the api call is defeat.racism()
- jmclnx 3y agoSounds like a law suit, if so I hope he wins big. This will get these smart device manufacturers get serious about security and user issues. He could have died if he had a serious illness that required meds.
- lagniappe 3y agoImagine if it locked an elder or child in there, or animals requiring care. Also, if food were on the stove and the house caught fire who's at fault here, the API? edit: I read the article
- devb 3y agoYou clearly didn't read the article.
- jmclnx 3y ago>This incident left me with a house full of unresponsive devices, a silent Alexa, and a lot of questions." I did read the article. But I took it to mean the smart device associated with getting into the house was disabled too. The article was not to clear on whether he could get in to his house or not.
- circuit10 3y agoIf he couldn’t then how would he know the devices in it are unresponsive?
- JadeNB 3y agoAccording to the story, it is not describing literal locked doors—he appears to have been able to get in and out—just unresponsive devices.
- albert_e 3y agoAfter reading the linked blog post ... it seems the person was not literally "locked out" as in prevented from physically entering his own home. He was only blocked from using his smart devices like Alexa/ echo and similar smart devices for a week which I am sure was very inconvenient and reflects poorly on Amazon. But I do not think that would really be life threatening?
- mason55 3y agoI’m pretty blasé about control of my digital data, but the one place I won’t compromise is with smart home stuff. Run everything locally, or at least everything important. Use it as a convenience layer on top of physical control. Don’t ever rely on the cloud. And the best part is that this strategy perfectly aligns both control of your access and the ability/convenience for your house to still act like a normal house. > ”If you buy a device you own it, and that’s regardless of who you are,” No one disputed that he still owned his echo devices. The question is whether Amazon owes him access to their services. I think banning him over this was dumb but it’s not like Andy Jassey came into his house and took away all his Echo Dots.
- x86x87 3y agoI have a different take: i don't want to see any smart devices in my home. I'm cool with having a dumb home.
- mason55 3y agoCertainly your prerogative. I get a lot of value out of running Home Assistant (open source) + Zwave lights (local only + industry standard + physical switches for everything) + things like a Bluetooth controlled valve on my hose spigot that's underneath the deck. The only real failure mode is that my server goes down and I have to control the lights with the switches on the wall like a normal person. But I can certainly understand why someone wouldn't want to maintain the infrastructure.
- signal11 3y agoThat’s what the person affected here did: > I was not truly in the dark for a week. My smart home runs mostly locally and Alexa really is just a polymorphic interface. I was just able to use Siri. Though out of habit I’d sometimes say “alexa” only for her to remind me how stupid I was. https://medium.com/@bjax_/a-tale-of-unwanted-disruption-my-week-without-amazon-df1074e3818b https://medium.com/@bjax_/a-tale-of-unwanted-disruption-my-w...
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
- EscapeFromNY 3y ago> his account had been locked due to a report from a delivery driver who claimed to have received racist remarks. There's a fun attack vector. Apparently any delivery driver can disable someone's Amazon account with a single report, with no checks and balances
- readyplayernull 3y agoThe usual driver vulnerability
- CoastalCoder 3y agoI guess a silver lining is that this story can serve as a warning to others. It caused enough relatable pain to stick in people's minds, but nobody died.
- morkalork 3y agoFuture ethicists ponder: Should a smart toaster be forced to toast toast for Hitler?
- mwigdahl 3y agoAnother example demonstrating that when functionality in your life is provided by ongoing, private subscription-based services, they can be disrupted at the slightest whim of the corporate behemoth providing them. At least this guy was able to get some redress after abasing himself before the corporate apparatus. We (in the US at least) badly need robust consumer protections and some sort of standardized right of due process extended to our subscription-based interactions with private companies.
- api 3y agoIf it depends on a cloud account to work you don’t own it. Full stop.
- js2 3y agoDiscussion (125 points, 71 comments) from 2 days ago on the blog post itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296250
- gabereiser 3y agoDo NOT give control of your home or domicile to tech giants. Even if you work for them. Giving up your domain to another is essentially giving them the keys and you a code. You are no longer in control of your house, you are no longer in control of your belongings, you are no longer in control of your life. Don’t do it.
- harry8 3y agoYes. And this is not the first time I've heard this. Eg mobile phones. Then everyone else does it and you can't exist in the world without it unless you pay a huge penalty. No smartphone is really tough to pull off nowadays so all the "it's a device whose purpose is to spy on you" is still just as true but the boat sailed, possibly without your uncoerced consent. Maybe not this time? Maybe people will hold out? Maybe we won't get locked in by everyone else?
- 411111111111111 3y ago> Maybe not this time? Maybe people will hold out? Maybe we won't get locked in by everyone else? It won't, because 'cloud'-smart home is a total gimmick. You get better service by getting local first smart services (ZigBee etc), and even that is barely worth it. It's neat and a fun toy, but ultimately not going to ever see widespread use beyond enthusiast bubbles. I did get my home fully automated though wrt heating/lighting, but it's more akin to a hobby then the value you get from a phone.
- harry8 3y agosmartphones started out as a gimmick, neat fun toy, barely worth it. I never saw needing one to run an app deal with the government, for example. .. Smart home now is not smart home in 5 years is not smart home in 10. You could still be correct, we'll see, I guess.
- pengaru 3y agoThe same logic should arguably be applied to your transportation as well IMNSHO.
- bbor 3y agoTitle is ridiculous clickbait. “Locked out of smart home” implies a lot more than “had to manually flip switches for a week”. It’s a shame, bc this is obviously an insane thing for Amazon to do, and worth discussing.
- sb8244 3y agoThis was my immediate thought when I saw the title. Very misleading
- NovemberWhiskey 3y agoI mean, depending on the scope of what he was actually locked out of, doesn't Amazon own Ring, which could well include your video security, your alarm system and so on? That's beyond a mild inconvenience.
- signal11 3y agoHe could use Siri, as he noted in his blog post[1] But the issue he raises is quite serious. Getting your Amazon account locked out isn’t funny at all, given how many services they provide. [1] https://medium.com/@bjax_/a-tale-of-unwanted-disruption-my-week-without-amazon-df1074e3818b https://medium.com/@bjax_/a-tale-of-unwanted-disruption-my-w...
- constantcrying 3y agoThe (likely less obvious) thing the author meant was that the person in question was locked out of the "smart" parts of their home. But yes, the title is clearly bad and you can already see confused people in the comments here.
- kapp_in_life 3y agoIt's likely the clickbait title was intentional. Otherwise they could have simply clarified "smart home gadgets".
- Attrecomet 3y agoWell, Amazon did try to lock him out of his smart home, and there is zero evidence that they would have cared had that meant him being homeless for a week. It just happens that he luckily was technically competent enough to have a flexible setup and know what to do with it.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoOriginal source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296250
- haswell 3y agoWe have some big problems to solve this decade. This hints at what is essentially the capitalist version of a “social credit score” (or at least leans in that direction), and is deeply concerning. It goes hand-in-hand with credit card companies holding immense power over businesses, and when coupled with other trends like the bulk purchasing of consumer data by the government, unchecked expansion of ML/AI, etc. it feels like the tech industry is on a precipice of sorts. A subtle push and we descend into an authoritarian techno-dystopia…or maybe we’re already there. As a product manager, the thing that bothers me is that a human made the decision to green light a feature that would deny access one’s devices. Having worked with many PMs who don’t seem to give many shits about 2nd/3rd order effects of their product decisions, it’s rather worrisome to see products increase their impact on daily life in the most fundamental of ways, while knowing that a large number of people who hold this influence have no business doing so.
- robnado 3y agoWith the importance that tech company accounts have today, the bar for blocking access should be incredibly high.
- negamax 3y agoThis man has patience of a sage. He's considering not using Amazon devices? I would had thrown all of it by now. Poor man locked himself in a digital jail
- NikolaNovak 3y agoI was astonished with that phrasing too. It immediately takes out all the impact of his rage. You take away all of your services for a week and he's only considering not using them anymore? It's the empties threat I've heard in a long while :-(
- boringg 3y agoHe's navigating for a payout.
- px43 3y agoFrom the source article: > I was not truly in the dark for a week. My smart home runs mostly locally and Alexa really is just a polymorphic interface. I was just able to use Siri. Though out of habit I’d sometimes say “alexa” only for her to remind me how stupid I was. Dude spent a week without being able to talk to Alexa. The headline seems a bit overblown IMO.
- avs733 3y agoBut it generates angry clicks!
- mc32 3y agoIt was not just that. Even if it was just that; Amazon has no right to disable an account or services unilaterally like that with little recourse from the user.
- px43 3y ago> Amazon has no right to disable an account or services unilaterally like that with little recourse from the user. Yeah, that's literally the entire point of federated identity. If you give an identity provider the rights to your identity, they have the ability to grant or revoke privileges at will. If you don't like that, do your part in promoting self sovereign identity standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-sovereign_identity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-sovereign_identity
- krger 3y ago>Amazon has no right to disable an account or services unilaterally like that with little recourse from the user. Tell me you haven't read the TOS without telling me you haven't read the TOS. Some Amazon employees certainly overreacted too quickly by disabling this guy's services, but Amazon certainly has the right to disable an account and discontinue service for any reason not expressly prohibited by law (and this isn't one of them).
- mc32 3y agoYou're right; but I meant that in a colloquial manner. What I'm saying is services like these that are becoming as indispensable as utilities should have a system in place for lodging complaints and disputes and mechanisms to resolve them. The city cannot cut my water just because I yell epithets at the mayor, whether they agree or disagree. Now, sure, this is more of a civil matter but due to the importance of the services, they should have proper mechanisms in place for these kinds of things, otherwise, it's he said, she said and both customers and employees can willy nilly accuse each other of transgressions and have services suspended or employment terminated, etc., unfairly and without evidence in many cases.
- iamflimflam1 3y agoOk, so from his blog post, not locked out of his house, just locked out of his Alexa... "I do want to note that since I host many of my own local services and many devices are local only. I only lost the ability to use Alexa. My home was fine as I just used Siri or locally hosted dashboard if I wanted to change a light’s color or something of that nature."
- Fervicus 3y agoThe absurdity of this article has me emotionally confused. I don't know whether I should laugh or be angry.
- superkuh 3y agoPlay stupid games, win stupid prizes. You explicitly do not own any of the devices or the services they provide in this context. It's good the guy realizes now the way forwards is running software he controls on computers that are his property. It's too bad that as a software engineer he didn't realize this beforehand like he should have been able to.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- boringg 3y agoClick bait title - but still a concerning issue. Wow - that's absurdist reality for you. How does Amazon allow for that to happen and lock you out of all your accounts for a non reason?! The shoot first ask questions second nature of this is baffling. Not to mention there is zero reason that they should be allowed to do that in first place. Smart home is a failed product at this point. I don't condone racist behavior but that is 100% not the job of Amazon to determine who is or is not racist and cut them out as a result.
- cesarb 3y agoOne thing I haven't seen mentioned in the comments here yet: once again, this shows the risk of using the same account for more than one purpose. If I understood the article correctly, a report from an Amazon delivery driver locked the user from his Amazon account, and the same account was also used for the Amazon devices linked to his home automation. Had he used separate accounts for deliveries and the devices, the mistaken accusation might have affected only the delivery account, leaving the devices working.
- failTide 3y agoDo we ever learn what the 'racist remark' was supposed to have been?
- carlosjobim 3y agoRacism is the de-facto state religion of the United States – so people who are not Americans need to understand this as in he is accused of heresy and being a heretic. Which is the worst crime of all in a religious society and in the eyes of zealots. Amazon won't mess with your house if you're accused of worse things, such as violent crimes. But they will take it upon themselves to enforce the state religion, not even questioning what they are doing.
- mrangle 3y agoImagine leaving the future of your high-development-cost products and even your giga-dollar brand reputation in the hands of a single delivery driver. It's a malicious actor's picnic. Somebodies in some chain of policy creation may be fired.
- boredumb 3y agoI'm just now starting to compile together components to start building out my own 'smart home' via zigbee + home-assistant on a local laptop. Click bait or not it's a funny little reminder why i'm not going with the off the shelf systems tied to increasingly insane tech companies.
- dotnet00 3y agoHad the same experience when I was setting up mine. First I ordered some wifi connected bulbs, but had to send them back upon realizing the idiocy of having a bulb that can connect to the internet. Their recommended approach for using it was to set it up with a cloud service. While I could've just used a separate offline wifi network, I too ended up going for Zigbee bulbs instead. Got a Zigbee dongle and set it up on my server with zigbee2mqtt and home assistant. Has worked flawlessly for years.
- boredumb 3y agoYou'll own nothing, and you'll be *****
- maxclark 3y ago“I am seriously considering discontinuing my use of Amazon Echo devices and will caution others about this incident” And learned nothing from the experience
- happytoexplain 3y agoThat's a dramatic lie, even for clickbait. He was not locked out of his smart home - his Amazon smart devices were disabled. Still something perfectly valid to write a story about. There really needs to be some kind of stronger mechanism for punishing this level of clickbait.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- r3trohack3r 3y ago“Alexa, open the pod bay doors” “I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that”
- meepmorp 3y agoWhy doesn't he have a key to his house? Notwithstanding the larger issues about getting locked out of accounts, if his power/internet were out, wouldn't he be just as screwed? Don't ceed control of your home to technology you don't control, but also make sure there's a low tech backdoor in case you need one because you need to live there even if the fancy stuff goes off.
- zzzeek 3y agoEXTREMELY misleading headline. Man was not, as so many of us would read, "locked out of his house", which pretty much anyone would interpret as the man did not have physical access to his house. No, nothing at all like that happened. What actually happened was, his Amazon devices *in* his house didn't work. Which is also not great but not on the level of being forced to live in your car for a week. There is no way the editors at the Independent didn't do this intentionally in order to generate clicks.
- figassis 3y agoThe important lesson here is: never commit to an ecosystem. Always be ready to hit eject and move to a competitor without a second thought. I keep too broadband accounts. I disconnect and reconnect the other at the slightest annoyance, like a fee to fix bad signal, delayed repairs, etc, you're out. Amazing how quickly they come back begging. I also put virtual debit cards on most subscriptions. Easy to just stop paying, no credit reporting issues, no hunting for account cancellation pages. It takes some work, but being a subscription/provider nomad pays off.
- trabant00 3y ago> Due to this experience, I am seriously considering discontinuing my use of Amazon Echo devices A tech worker installs IOT everything in his house, actually experiences complete failure, and now "considers" discontinuing the practice. How do I comment anything thoughtful? Not only he should have know better, but even faced with reality he still persists. He is not dropping the products, he would like them to be fixed. "Smart" Stockholm syndrome.
- bastawhiz 3y ago> I do want to note that since I host many of my own local services and many devices are local only. I only lost the ability to use Alexa. What a nothingburger