14 ms·

Amazon shuts down customer’s smart home

206 points by KnuthIsGod 3y ago

SN76477 3y ago
When did we stop being critical of technology and innovation? Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should... It's like we have opened Pandora's box allowing technology (with poor security) into our homes. Devices controlled and maintained by companies with questionable ethics who only care about the stock holder.
- TylerE 3y ago
  This story is bullshit. He wasn't "locked out of his home", his stuff wasn't disabled. Trying reading more into it.
  - ghostpepper 3y ago
    The first post of the linked forum thread says he was locked out of all his devices after a delivery driver misheard his automated doorbell response as saying something "inappropriate" and reported it to Amazon, who suspended his account for a week. How far do I need to read into the thread to find the alternate story you're describing?
  - shishy 3y ago
    https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/15/amazon_echo_disabled_allegation/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/15/amazon_echo_disabled_... > ...an Amazon spokesperson said, "We work hard to provide customers with a great experience while also ensuring drivers who deliver Amazon packages feel safe. In this case, we learned through our investigation that the customer did not act inappropriately, and we’re working directly with the customer to resolve their concerns while also looking at ways to prevent a similar situation from happening again." Seems like they kind of confirmed it? Or what dd you read that indicated otherwise?
    - TylerE 3y ago
      https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/news-this-must-reject-modernity-brandon-jackson-amazon-smart-home-drama-explained-racism-controversy-leaves-netizens-baffled https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/news-this-must-rejec... "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." Even at that the only thing turned off was his Amazon Echo. Initial reporting on this story, especially the right-wing press, made it out like he was physically locked out of him home, or his appliances were remotely disabled. Neither is at all accurate.
- ghusto 3y ago
  It's insanity (literally, if you speak to some therapists, but that's a longer story). My thermostat automatically keeps the temperature at the temperature I set. How much smarter does it need to be? My doorbell rings so I can hear it an answer the door, like the fully abled person I am. My fridge keeps things at the temperature I set. Where are the problems these smart devices are solving?
moepstar 3y ago
Smarthome? Mine's local only, for good reasons. I don't have to care about some companys loss leader product eventually going from free to paid, or being disabled alltogether because they decided that Smarthome isn't something they actually want to be in. Sucks for the planet, sucks for peoples wallets as most of that is probably going straight to the landfill :(
- mrweasel 3y ago
  There's a lot of technology product that should never have been produced. Try watching a video on YouTube reviewing random crap from Wish. You'd be in awe of the amount of absolute garbage that's produced. Most of it doesn't even work, so why bother making it and just jump to straight up robbing people. Much of the current IOT and smart home products are only slight better. Much of it will be useless once the manufacturer decides that they don't actually want to support a 10 year old device. Maybe they are bought out, go bankrupt, change business or the stockholders demand higher returns and they bump your subscription 10x. It somewhat impressive that we've managed to build business that are completely blind to the fact that a five year update cycle actually isn't that impressive, or that killing of services and products will generate excessive amounts of waste. It probably to complex to regulate correctly, but really it should be a rules that you place documentation and perhaps code in escrow when you release an IOT device, once you no longer wish to support that device, the code and documentation should be released.
  - vxNsr 3y ago
    This could only work if you are forced to release the copyrights and patents as well. Or if they’re sold the buyer must maintain the service for some arbitrary number of years (say 10) until it’s unlikely a majority of the users are still using the service, or offer full refunds.
    - mrweasel 3y ago
      May we should just require all IOT devices to use SNMP. I always wanted to be able to monitor my home using Nagios anyway.
poink 3y ago
I'm usually an early adopter for tech stuff, but I'm not interested in this smart home crap at all. The idea that vendors could remotely mess with it is back of mind, but the main thing is that it ~all just seems worse than the stuff it replaces. My door locks, light switches, and thermostats have simply never bothered me enough to consider the hassle of automating them, even assuming the automation works perfectly (it won't) and the "smart" devices are just as reliable as the things they replace (they aren't).
- Groxx 3y ago
  Home automation stuff particularly seems... problematic for the current market. Houses and stuff installed in them regularly out-live these product lines, and many of them are proprietary and only work with their brand, possibly that one product line. If you're willing to consider them disposable and are alright with that, that might be reasonable and they do some neat stuff, but they're certainly not systems that last :\
  - ehnto 3y ago
    I would love to hear of counter-examples, what pieces of tech that rely on third party service have actually lasted more than 10 years? I don't trust a SaaS to stick around for 6 months, let alone integrate into a 30+ year home.
    - simonjgreen 3y ago
      All of my ZigBee lighting. My house has been entirely ZigBee for over a decade. If by third party service you mean cloud then I'd suggest Hue, but I actually run mine locally.
      - xattt 3y ago
        Hubitat is exactly this (runs locally), but with a lot more support for what gets blessed but the corporate owner.
      - Groxx 3y ago
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
Alexa, Siri, and Google are mostly just voice assistant front ends. I use Lutron for shades and lights, and have connected all front ends to them. Alexa is pretty much useless so I’m not sure about it’s reliability (well, I can turn off my Samsung TV), Siri works well but often has unexplained outages where it just doesn’t work for days at a time, and Google is pretty reliable as well as useful (and also drives my nest/google security cameras). I also have specific apps on my phone (eg Lutron, Yale, Samsung) that bypass voice assistant front ends. But the reason I use voice assistants at all is that I can control all my shades at once to raise and lower them (as well as turn all the living room lights on), basically bulk convenience.
- imoverclocked 3y ago
  I only use one assistant but yes, being able to send a command to do a bunch of things at once is pretty awesome. Some things in this genre that I do on a daily basis: "turn the outside lights on" -- I have two different structures with lights hung around the underside of the roofs. It's very dark where I live. Walking between buildings at night is really easy now because everything is illuminated between both places without installing a really long three-way switch. "turn the outside lights off" -- Maybe I'm already outside looking at the sky and want a little more clarity. Now I don't need to go find all the light switches for everything that is on. "turn all the lights off" -- I'm laying in bed, about to go to sleep. Did I forget to turn anything off? "time for bed" -- It's time to dim the lights and start cooling my brain down. This sets the scene nicely from wherever I happen to be. -- I don't trust it for things like locks/garage door openers/etc. Compromising my network shouldn't compromise my physical security.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Having it on your lock allows you to ask Siri if you locked your door or if your door is ajar. No more going down in the middle of the night to check to see if you remembered to close and lock your door, you just go down and look. Also, auto lock acted 10 minutes is nice. Not to mention proximity unlocks, but I see how people are paranoid.
p-e-w 3y ago
Title of the original video: "Amazon accuses customer of racism & shuts down their smart home" So there is 1. surveillance/control techno-fascism 2. US-centric political zeitgeist 3. useless cloud garbage all rolled into one. This is without a doubt the most contemporary story I've seen in a while.
- ChoHag 3y ago
  Don't forget 4: Bold assertions that this couldn't possibly happen in our corporate 'topia followed by silence after the non-apology by the company that did it.
- bsder 3y ago
  It's also unusual because this is Amazon instead of Google. Amazon is suddenly going to suspend someone because a random employee made a report?! With neither verification nor advance notice? Excuse me? That seems like it could very well stand under racketeering laws--"Nice delivery service you got there--shame if something were to happen to it." I hope there is an ambulance chaser salivating over this.
  - Nasrudith 3y ago
    It is never RICO damn it!
- no_butterscotch 3y ago
  Wow when I saw the title I thought "is this related to the case from earlier" and it appears to be one and the same. I can't believe anyone would buy an Amazon product after this, it's crazy! Can your other IOT things be shut off? Can your AWS account be disabled?
  - gryn 3y ago
    the answer to all of those are yes. it's the reason why you should not put all your eggs in on basket. especially the case for google. ex, with their anti adblock movement in youtube, there's a small chance you might find yourself locked from your emails, GCP, Drive and every other service if they decide to be more aggressive about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36747367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36747367
sliken 3y ago
Sure it's a pain in the ass, but this is exhibit A on why one needs to use home assistant and build your infrastructure/services for your home based on things you control. Outsourcing monitoring of cameras, control of doors, monitoring of occupancy, and related is a bad move. Especially when homes are designed to last many decades if not centuries and should work even when the internet is out or some random company dies, is acquired, gets bored with a product, decides to monetizing a service in annoying ways, or to increase the API costs to unreasonable rates.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  > but this is exhibit A on why one needs to use home assistant and build your infrastructure/services for your home based on things you control Alternatively, you could simply not have a "smart home" in the first place, saving money, hassle, and having to worry about issues like this. Which, ironically, is a pretty smart choice.
  - baz00 3y ago
    This is the correct answer. A smart home is technology for the sake of technology, not solving a need as such.
    - mjhagen 3y ago
      I like some things reasonably smart (boiler, ventilation), devices that learn from the occupant’s behaviour in order to be more economical with energy for instance. I'm not a fan of other "smart" tech, like lights, stoves, ovens, fridges, etc.
      - baz00 3y ago
        My heating is demand based and my ventilation is measurement based. There is no real need for smart there past a set point and some hysteresis. An analogue comparator is enough tech there! The moment you make it clever past this you incur the overheads of the whole system production in the efficiency cycle. That means the manufacture and distribution of a complex computer system.
albertopv 3y ago
I would not ever give full control "of my house" to a corporation, small or big doesn't matter. It's just insane, imho.
- squarefoot 3y ago
  Exactly. If a technology is used against its users the problem isn't that technology. Any device that is closed source and connected will be used to spy on their users, from simple business driven profiling to more shady things, but it's certain that it will do other things than those advertised. Consumers should learn to ask for privacy as a default and be a lot more selective in what they surrender their data to. So far, it seems a lost battle to me.
- ricardobayes 3y ago
  So you don't have electricity at home?
  - psd1 3y ago
    Not to invalidate your point, but some countries have the concept of "utility" defined in law. This adds a bunch of gates that must be passed before the provider can cut service. Your power can only be cut after months of non-payment and not, e.g., because you are racist to their worker. Also, the power going out doesn't break your legacy door locks.
    - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
      Here's a list of disconnect policies by state, with emphasis on what conditions prevent the disconnect of power. https://liheapch.acf.hhs.gov/Disconnect/disconnect.htm https://liheapch.acf.hhs.gov/Disconnect/disconnect.htm
      - ricardobayes 3y ago
        These are pretty interesting. Here in Spain by law they can't disconnect you (not even for non-payment) if you have medical equipment like CPAP. https://administracion.gob.es/pag_Home/en/Tu-espacio-europeo/derechos-obligaciones/ciudadanos/consumidores/conexion-servicios/electricidad.html https://administracion.gob.es/pag_Home/en/Tu-espacio-europeo...
vxNsr 3y ago
What’s interesting is Rossman says in a follow up video that his affiliate link account was killed soon after publishing that video. So not only are they watching his videos, but they’re petty enough to respond that immaturely. Says a lot about the culture over there. A lot of SV type companies are totally politically captured and it seems like less and less actual innovation is coming out of them.
chrisbolt 3y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36443747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36443747
Animats 3y ago
This is a a video of some guy reading someone else's web site aloud. Please find a link to the actual web site being read. Thank you.
- _rs 3y ago
  It’s the first link in the video description: 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...
  - Animats 3y ago
    That ends with: "Update: 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 she’s locked out." So none of this home shutdown actually happened. It's fake news.
    - mcv 3y ago
      So the guy was saved by dependency on two corporations instead of one. That fixes the monopolistic control issue, but not the remote disabling of devices and services that you paid for and are supposed to control.
    - Terretta 3y ago
      > So none of this home shutdown actually happened. It's fake news. Could it have happened? Put another way, does it matter whether fake or not to inform improvement?
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  Does that deserve a copyright strike?
baz00 3y ago
I closed my Amazon retail account recently because their automated customer service screwed up a warranty claim. The humans I finally talked to were useless. I realised at that point I was an inconvenience past making the initial sale. Why would I risk anything like a smart home on that level of service, support and customer care? AWS are only marginally better, despite being a high rolling enterprise customer.
shoulderfake 3y ago
[dead]
hkt 3y ago
Cloud connected smart homes are a terrible idea. Why anyone would pay to install surveillance devices in their homes is utterly beyond me.
thriftwy 3y ago
I wonder if they understand that they're basically firing half of their US audience, according to the people who they back politically. (Disclaimer: Not from US; popcorn grabbed)
- akomtu 3y ago
  This half is very conservative with tech, and owners of the big tech hate anything conservative.
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    This half owns a lot of homes, though, more so than the other one, who is also less conservative about owning a home.
marcus_holmes 3y ago
I wonder if their Kindle stopped working too? This kind of shit is why I still advise everyone who asks me (as the tech guy in the family) not to use any home automation that is connected to the cloud.
- timeon 3y ago
  I also use other device than kindle and do not buy ebooks on amazon.
optimalsolver 3y ago
[flagged]
- fdsafdassd 3y ago
  [flagged]
- rkangel 3y ago
  I don't like racists either, but I don't understand how you don't draw the conclusion from this story that there was both centralisation of power and abuse of power. First - he wasn't racist. It was misheard. And second just because a company thinks you're racist they shouldn't be able to take reprisals because they don't have the appropriate checks and balances appropriate for that sort of power - we've all read the stories of Google shutting down people's accounts with no appeal. What you've got here is vigilante justice, misapplied to someone who's innocent. This should involve an appropriate system with appropriate checks and balances - like the justice system.
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    I'm not sure this is unequivocally "vigilante justice". Because to me, it seems more like "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone." The intent of Amazon was not to disable the guy's smart home, or lock him out of his house. Amazon intended to deny him service across the board by suspending his account. Being logged out of Alexa is a side-effect of that, but we don't know if Amazon took an inventory of services he uses before they made the decision to suspend. So, if it were a real incident of racist abuse and Amazon suspended the account, would that matter? People can be denied government benefits if they act abusively toward a case worker. They can also be denied medical treatment and ejected from a hospital if they are abusive to HCPs there. (Exception for mental hospitals, where they just get locked down and sedated instead.) So does a company like this Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone? Or are they too deep and wide to exercise that right? If a company controls your digital life and holds most of your personal data, do they have the right to cut off your access with an AI-based decision? I'm not sure it's "vigilante justice" but it may be more like "racketeering".
grishka 3y ago
Why would anyone allow the smart home hub to connect to the internet? Just keep it in your LAN. You'll still have 99% of the functionality.
no_butterscotch 3y ago
Amazon has gotten too big. Last year I canceled my Prime and am doing my best to use alternatives. But it's become hard, I still sometimes use Amazon and pay for shipping or use the free long-ass shipping if it exists.
GoofballJones 3y ago
I have a dumb home. No smart thermostat. No smart doorbell. No cameras festooning the outside of my house. No smart TV. No smart home owner. Long ago, I saw a movie as a kid in the 1970s called Demon Seed, where this big computer gained consciousness and extended it's presence to a smart home (well, smart home with tech from the 1970s). It scared the heck out of me, even though seeing it now it's pretty tame...regardless of the whole impregnating a woman with it's child.
- hef19898 3y ago
  The only concession we have is a smart TV, try find dumb ones today. Oh, and a basically always disconnected, when not used, Alexa and a Google smart speaker I got for free once which I haven't seen in quite a while...
  - GoofballJones 3y ago
    Oh I have a TV that's "smart", but like you it's not connected at all to my WiFi. It's just a dumb terminal to my AppleTV. On levels of trust, I would put the AppleTV above my old Nvidia Shield and MUCH higher than my old Roku box. My main gripe with smart devices is their sketchy software that may or may not have vulnerabilities in them and may or may not be diligently updated with security fixes by the company that makes them. If I can concentrate most things to one device...like the AppleTV, which gets updates all the time...then I can isolate problems. If I have to worry about a myriad of things throughout the house, that's something else.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Ours is network connected. But then it is a model than runs Amazon Fire TV natively, and nothing else from the TV set OEM. Wouldn't make much sense to not connect the TV, and connect the plugged in Fire TV stick... That being said, despite being rather happy with it (mostly, the storage runs full way too often for my taste), I'd rather have simply a dumb display.
- Dr4kn 3y ago
  I have a smart home and it works great, but it all runs locally. ZigBee for most devices, because it is an encrypted local mesh communication protocol. The things that use wifi have no internet connection. Home Assistant is open source and runs everything locally. If a vendor of any products doesn't support their ZigBee hub anymore I don't care. Home Assistant is my ZigBee Hub. If any cloud service is shut off I don't care, because nothing is in the cloud. If you build new KNX is great. It works with Home Assistant and it's just a bus system. You program it once and it works for decades.
seydor 3y ago
I see a lot of opportunity here to fight racism
Woshiwuja 3y ago
Disgusting fascist behaviour
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
OtomotO 3y ago
Another one PRO climate catastrophe! Let's produce even more e-waste please. Let's do our best to end this quick, maybe in the next turn of the wheel we'll get better cards (or smarter humans that can live with a "dumb" house)
glimshe 3y ago
If anyone is wondering why Free Software is important, that's a big reason right there. If you have a corporation in complete control of the computers in your home, they are not yours by definition. Arguably, your home is no longer yours if these computers are central to the functioning of your home. I'm always careful with going all-in on modern "ecosystems", like buying "everything Apple", "everything Google", having "all my data in XYZ Cloud" without some way to cut them out of the loop.
Anthony-G 3y ago
> Since it was a smart doorbell with a camera, he had a recording of exactly what happened so he was able to send that to Amazon and they reinstated his account. If this story is true, the Amazon customer was lucky that he didn’t have a Ring doorbell. Otherwise, he probably wouldn’t have been able to access the recording and would be in a Catch-22 situation. It could have taken much longer than a week to to get his home working again.
stevenjgarner 3y ago
I would like to push back a little on the IoT haters here. I assist in the management of a number of short-term rental homes. The short-term rental industry is enabled in large part because of IoT. For example, we use Wi-Fi enabled digital door locks to provide custom door codes for guests and cleaners. These codes can be managed and monitored remotely. More specifically, in one trial we implemented the (keyless) Google Nest x Yale Lock [1] - great when it was working, but locksmiths were called on more than one occasion when it was not. Then we had the epiphany to implement the (keyed) Yale Assure Lock Touchscreen with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth [2], which solved that problem giving us the fail normal desired outcome. It was only in talking with Yale tech support that we realized these are virtually the same locks (one keyed / one not), and despite a near absence of technical supporting information, they both worked just as well on Google Home. I cannot emphasize the fail normal requirement enough with IoT devices, as discussed elsewhere here. We similarly provision a large number of other IoT devices to improve guest experience including Nest thermostats, Nest Protect smoke and CO alarms, Chromecast Google TV, and (outside) Google Nest security cameras/floodlights. Most guests now require these features at a minimum. I apologize that this reads somewhat as a Google advertisement, and that is one of my problems with IoT and IMHO one of the main reasons for its lack of wider adoption - product lines are proprietary and there are no well-implemented standards for cross-vendor compatibility. For example, Amazon eero wifi nodes cannot be substituted with Google Nest Wifi nodes - they use incompatible proprietary mesh networking technology. [1] https://store.google.com/product/nest_x_yale_lock https://store.google.com/product/nest_x_yale_lock [2] https://shopyalehome.com/products/yale-assure-lock-touchscreen-with-wi-fi-and-bluetooth https://shopyalehome.com/products/yale-assure-lock-touchscre...
- saurik 3y ago
  You can implement the features you want for your rental home without the downsides we hate by merely doing end-to-end encrypted communication--and likely even peer-to-peer direct communication (and, if not, using a neutral third party to coordinate rather than the manufacturer)--from your computer to the device in question and requiring manual approval of firmware updates, which should not involve any kind of vendor signature requirement. The default assumption that the company selling the product should have complete control over the software running on the device at all times, that they should have complete control over usage and access of the device, and that they even should have complete visibility to all of the data collected by the device, is so ridiculous as to be downright egregious: it requires someone who has almost nothing but contempt for users--even if they want to claim they somehow are helping them "for their own good"--to even contemplate such an architecture.
boredumb 3y ago
I'm building a smart home currently into the old beat up house i'm fixing up! Home assistant is great, I bought almost all the sensors and cameras online and they operate over zigbee, Matrix server to act as an alert box and a ghetto "intercom" system... having lots of fun with it and most of that is from me refusing to use google or amazons smart home IoT-phone-home products. I'm sure there are things I'm missing out on but it's been a lot of fun hacking them all together on a little mini-pc I picked up.
anotherevan 3y ago
Remember that the "S" in "IoT" stands for "security".
mcv 3y ago
It's all about unfounded accusations, but even if the accusations are founded, if the person living there is the worst fucking racist who deserves to be shunned; that may be a valid reason for Amazon to stop delivering stuff to his home, and refuse to sell anything to him, but not to disable his entire home and disable the devices that he has already paid for. Once you've sold it, it shouldn't be yours anymore. Inviting this kind of surveillance into your home, where we're being policed by profit-driven corporations, is the biggest condemnation of this sort of IoT crap. Imagine if my car stops working if Toyota disapproves of something I say. Imagine I can't pay for food because of something I said. Pulling this sort of crap should be punished with heavy fines. And if companies are at the same time held responsible for the stuff that goes through their servers and that creates an impossible situation for them, then maybe they shouldn't be creating these sort of dependencies at all.
- N19PEDL2 3y ago
  Totally agree. Moreover, there could be people living in the same house who are not involved in the racism incident in any way but are still affected by Amazon's decision.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  A company refusing to deliver products because they are gay, racist or black is wrong
  - Timon3 3y ago
    One of those is not like the other. Can you explain why you see them as similar?
    - JohnClark1337 3y ago
      [dead]
    - Supermancho 3y ago
      These terms (gay, black, racist) are arbitrary classifications that are just broad enough to be useful, but are often attributed due to narrow characteristics or specific behaviors. eg "acting <label>"
superhumanuser 3y ago
Score another one for the conspiracy theorists who predicted and warned us about this years ago.
npteljes 3y ago
Well, this is what it looks like when someone builds on another private entity's infrastructure. This kind of risk is built-in from the start, and as such, I think it must be considered before investing in it.
tenpies 3y ago
From the Youtube comments too: > My Amazon “community privileges” got suspended for “racism” after I correctly told a Chinese air filter company that their product was garbage. They false-flagged my review for racism. My review was not racist in any way. Suddenly, twenty years of my Amazon reviews (including long essays on academic books) got deleted Something to think about the next time you honestly review something on Amazon.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
jamesgreenleaf 3y ago
There should be laws & regulations around this type of thing. Critical devices that run your home should always be able to disconnect and continue to run. Any cloud-connected features should be entirely optional.
balderdash 3y ago
It seems that as a companies size, breadth of product, market, share, and reliance by the general population increases, that the burden of proof, and its ability to turn off its services on a whim should decrease, and customer protections should increase.
scioto 3y ago
And that is why I don't have any "smart" devices in my house. Except for my Internet-connected bathroom scale. It's been giving me the side-eye for a while now.
Anthony-G 3y ago
I had some doubts about the veracity of this story since there’s so little information in the linked article. It turns out that it is true – and was already submitted to Hacker News a number of times over the past month or so: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36348842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36348842 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36340095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36340095 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296250 The original article by the customer: 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... Also reported in The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/15/amazon_echo_disabled_allegation/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/15/amazon_echo_disabled_...
JohnFen 3y ago
To the greatest extent possible, it's best to avoid giving any corporation the ability to shut any part of your life down. I still don't understand why people are willing to rely on devices like this without having control over them.
fallinghawks 3y ago
I don't have smart home stuff at my own house except for some cameras, which aren't being used in an automated manner. I installed cameras, a water heater flood monitor, and a smart switch at a vacation home shared by me and my siblings. Sometimes things need rebooting and a smart switch lets me do that remotely. But things that can inadvertently lock you out or do something expensive with your HVAC are not for me.
LinuxBender 3y ago
Similar to how I can add cameras to ZoneMinder and keep all my data on-prem, is there a platform that people can move their home automation to and have full control over cloud access, ideally with a hardware compatibility list and preferably without having to hack the firmware? Also ideally light-weight enough to run on a RasPi or mini-pc. I assume this platform would also need to be able to make API calls only those I configure to Amazon, Walmart, CVS, VPS providers, Utility bills, IRS, etc... to purchase my 10,000 rolls of toilet paper so it should be vendor agnostic and must not talk when not expected to. reward the most affordable, reliable and unbiased vendors and not leak data
ghusto 3y ago
I understand a tech-enthusiasm driven deployment of "smart" devices in your home — not for me, you understand, but I get that people like shinies — but when is this going to end? Hasn't the novelty warn off for people yet? Or maybe it has for the first wave, and it's just going to take a while before everyone who's susceptible goes through the process of realising it's pointless?
Thoreandan 3y ago
Was surprised to see in the comments that Tay Zonday had his decades of Amazon book reviews deleted when a vendor flagged a negative review he wrote about an air filter as racist.
boneitis 3y ago
A first-party account was submitted a while back at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296250 I'm right there with everyone else who wants to raise a pitchfork and hop on the Amazon-critical bandwagon. But, I felt it worth pointing out back then and again here that the seemingly bizarre choice of doorbell response "Excuse me, can I help you?" left me unsurprised that the delivery driver "misheard" it and set off this round of media hoopla.

206 points by KnuthIsGod 3y ago

When did we stop being critical of technology and innovation? Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should... It's like we have opened Pandora's box allowing technology (with poor security) into our homes. Devices controlled and maintained by companies with questionable ethics who only care about the stock holder.

TylerE 3y ago
This story is bullshit. He wasn't "locked out of his home", his stuff wasn't disabled. Trying reading more into it.
- ghostpepper 3y ago
  The first post of the linked forum thread says he was locked out of all his devices after a delivery driver misheard his automated doorbell response as saying something "inappropriate" and reported it to Amazon, who suspended his account for a week. How far do I need to read into the thread to find the alternate story you're describing?
- shishy 3y ago
  https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/15/amazon_echo_disabled_allegation/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/15/amazon_echo_disabled_... > ...an Amazon spokesperson said, "We work hard to provide customers with a great experience while also ensuring drivers who deliver Amazon packages feel safe. In this case, we learned through our investigation that the customer did not act inappropriately, and we’re working directly with the customer to resolve their concerns while also looking at ways to prevent a similar situation from happening again." Seems like they kind of confirmed it? Or what dd you read that indicated otherwise?
  - TylerE 3y ago
    https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/news-this-must-reject-modernity-brandon-jackson-amazon-smart-home-drama-explained-racism-controversy-leaves-netizens-baffled https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/news-this-must-rejec... "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." Even at that the only thing turned off was his Amazon Echo. Initial reporting on this story, especially the right-wing press, made it out like he was physically locked out of him home, or his appliances were remotely disabled. Neither is at all accurate.
ghusto 3y ago
It's insanity (literally, if you speak to some therapists, but that's a longer story). My thermostat automatically keeps the temperature at the temperature I set. How much smarter does it need to be? My doorbell rings so I can hear it an answer the door, like the fully abled person I am. My fridge keeps things at the temperature I set. Where are the problems these smart devices are solving?

moepstar 3y ago

Smarthome? Mine's local only, for good reasons. I don't have to care about some companys loss leader product eventually going from free to paid, or being disabled alltogether because they decided that Smarthome isn't something they actually want to be in. Sucks for the planet, sucks for peoples wallets as most of that is probably going straight to the landfill :(

mrweasel 3y ago
There's a lot of technology product that should never have been produced. Try watching a video on YouTube reviewing random crap from Wish. You'd be in awe of the amount of absolute garbage that's produced. Most of it doesn't even work, so why bother making it and just jump to straight up robbing people. Much of the current IOT and smart home products are only slight better. Much of it will be useless once the manufacturer decides that they don't actually want to support a 10 year old device. Maybe they are bought out, go bankrupt, change business or the stockholders demand higher returns and they bump your subscription 10x. It somewhat impressive that we've managed to build business that are completely blind to the fact that a five year update cycle actually isn't that impressive, or that killing of services and products will generate excessive amounts of waste. It probably to complex to regulate correctly, but really it should be a rules that you place documentation and perhaps code in escrow when you release an IOT device, once you no longer wish to support that device, the code and documentation should be released.
- vxNsr 3y ago
  This could only work if you are forced to release the copyrights and patents as well. Or if they’re sold the buyer must maintain the service for some arbitrary number of years (say 10) until it’s unlikely a majority of the users are still using the service, or offer full refunds.
  - mrweasel 3y ago
    May we should just require all IOT devices to use SNMP. I always wanted to be able to monitor my home using Nagios anyway.

poink 3y ago

I'm usually an early adopter for tech stuff, but I'm not interested in this smart home crap at all. The idea that vendors could remotely mess with it is back of mind, but the main thing is that it ~all just seems worse than the stuff it replaces. My door locks, light switches, and thermostats have simply never bothered me enough to consider the hassle of automating them, even assuming the automation works perfectly (it won't) and the "smart" devices are just as reliable as the things they replace (they aren't).

Groxx 3y ago
Home automation stuff particularly seems... problematic for the current market. Houses and stuff installed in them regularly out-live these product lines, and many of them are proprietary and only work with their brand, possibly that one product line. If you're willing to consider them disposable and are alright with that, that might be reasonable and they do some neat stuff, but they're certainly not systems that last :\
- ehnto 3y ago
  I would love to hear of counter-examples, what pieces of tech that rely on third party service have actually lasted more than 10 years? I don't trust a SaaS to stick around for 6 months, let alone integrate into a 30+ year home.
  - simonjgreen 3y ago
    All of my ZigBee lighting. My house has been entirely ZigBee for over a decade. If by third party service you mean cloud then I'd suggest Hue, but I actually run mine locally.
    - xattt 3y ago
      Hubitat is exactly this (runs locally), but with a lot more support for what gets blessed but the corporate owner.
    - Groxx 3y ago

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

Alexa, Siri, and Google are mostly just voice assistant front ends. I use Lutron for shades and lights, and have connected all front ends to them. Alexa is pretty much useless so I’m not sure about it’s reliability (well, I can turn off my Samsung TV), Siri works well but often has unexplained outages where it just doesn’t work for days at a time, and Google is pretty reliable as well as useful (and also drives my nest/google security cameras). I also have specific apps on my phone (eg Lutron, Yale, Samsung) that bypass voice assistant front ends. But the reason I use voice assistants at all is that I can control all my shades at once to raise and lower them (as well as turn all the living room lights on), basically bulk convenience.

imoverclocked 3y ago
I only use one assistant but yes, being able to send a command to do a bunch of things at once is pretty awesome. Some things in this genre that I do on a daily basis: "turn the outside lights on" -- I have two different structures with lights hung around the underside of the roofs. It's very dark where I live. Walking between buildings at night is really easy now because everything is illuminated between both places without installing a really long three-way switch. "turn the outside lights off" -- Maybe I'm already outside looking at the sky and want a little more clarity. Now I don't need to go find all the light switches for everything that is on. "turn all the lights off" -- I'm laying in bed, about to go to sleep. Did I forget to turn anything off? "time for bed" -- It's time to dim the lights and start cooling my brain down. This sets the scene nicely from wherever I happen to be. -- I don't trust it for things like locks/garage door openers/etc. Compromising my network shouldn't compromise my physical security.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Having it on your lock allows you to ask Siri if you locked your door or if your door is ajar. No more going down in the middle of the night to check to see if you remembered to close and lock your door, you just go down and look. Also, auto lock acted 10 minutes is nice. Not to mention proximity unlocks, but I see how people are paranoid.

p-e-w 3y ago

Title of the original video: "Amazon accuses customer of racism & shuts down their smart home" So there is 1. surveillance/control techno-fascism 2. US-centric political zeitgeist 3. useless cloud garbage all rolled into one. This is without a doubt the most contemporary story I've seen in a while.

ChoHag 3y ago
Don't forget 4: Bold assertions that this couldn't possibly happen in our corporate 'topia followed by silence after the non-apology by the company that did it.
bsder 3y ago
It's also unusual because this is Amazon instead of Google. Amazon is suddenly going to suspend someone because a random employee made a report?! With neither verification nor advance notice? Excuse me? That seems like it could very well stand under racketeering laws--"Nice delivery service you got there--shame if something were to happen to it." I hope there is an ambulance chaser salivating over this.
- Nasrudith 3y ago
  It is never RICO damn it!
no_butterscotch 3y ago
Wow when I saw the title I thought "is this related to the case from earlier" and it appears to be one and the same. I can't believe anyone would buy an Amazon product after this, it's crazy! Can your other IOT things be shut off? Can your AWS account be disabled?
- gryn 3y ago
  the answer to all of those are yes. it's the reason why you should not put all your eggs in on basket. especially the case for google. ex, with their anti adblock movement in youtube, there's a small chance you might find yourself locked from your emails, GCP, Drive and every other service if they decide to be more aggressive about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36747367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36747367

sliken 3y ago

Sure it's a pain in the ass, but this is exhibit A on why one needs to use home assistant and build your infrastructure/services for your home based on things you control. Outsourcing monitoring of cameras, control of doors, monitoring of occupancy, and related is a bad move. Especially when homes are designed to last many decades if not centuries and should work even when the internet is out or some random company dies, is acquired, gets bored with a product, decides to monetizing a service in annoying ways, or to increase the API costs to unreasonable rates.

p-e-w 3y ago
> but this is exhibit A on why one needs to use home assistant and build your infrastructure/services for your home based on things you control Alternatively, you could simply not have a "smart home" in the first place, saving money, hassle, and having to worry about issues like this. Which, ironically, is a pretty smart choice.
- baz00 3y ago
  This is the correct answer. A smart home is technology for the sake of technology, not solving a need as such.
  - mjhagen 3y ago
    I like some things reasonably smart (boiler, ventilation), devices that learn from the occupant’s behaviour in order to be more economical with energy for instance. I'm not a fan of other "smart" tech, like lights, stoves, ovens, fridges, etc.
    - baz00 3y ago
      My heating is demand based and my ventilation is measurement based. There is no real need for smart there past a set point and some hysteresis. An analogue comparator is enough tech there! The moment you make it clever past this you incur the overheads of the whole system production in the efficiency cycle. That means the manufacture and distribution of a complex computer system.

albertopv 3y ago

I would not ever give full control "of my house" to a corporation, small or big doesn't matter. It's just insane, imho.

squarefoot 3y ago
Exactly. If a technology is used against its users the problem isn't that technology. Any device that is closed source and connected will be used to spy on their users, from simple business driven profiling to more shady things, but it's certain that it will do other things than those advertised. Consumers should learn to ask for privacy as a default and be a lot more selective in what they surrender their data to. So far, it seems a lost battle to me.
ricardobayes 3y ago
So you don't have electricity at home?
- psd1 3y ago
  Not to invalidate your point, but some countries have the concept of "utility" defined in law. This adds a bunch of gates that must be passed before the provider can cut service. Your power can only be cut after months of non-payment and not, e.g., because you are racist to their worker. Also, the power going out doesn't break your legacy door locks.
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    Here's a list of disconnect policies by state, with emphasis on what conditions prevent the disconnect of power. https://liheapch.acf.hhs.gov/Disconnect/disconnect.htm https://liheapch.acf.hhs.gov/Disconnect/disconnect.htm
    - ricardobayes 3y ago
      These are pretty interesting. Here in Spain by law they can't disconnect you (not even for non-payment) if you have medical equipment like CPAP. https://administracion.gob.es/pag_Home/en/Tu-espacio-europeo/derechos-obligaciones/ciudadanos/consumidores/conexion-servicios/electricidad.html https://administracion.gob.es/pag_Home/en/Tu-espacio-europeo...

vxNsr 3y ago

What’s interesting is Rossman says in a follow up video that his affiliate link account was killed soon after publishing that video. So not only are they watching his videos, but they’re petty enough to respond that immaturely. Says a lot about the culture over there. A lot of SV type companies are totally politically captured and it seems like less and less actual innovation is coming out of them.

chrisbolt 3y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36443747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36443747

Animats 3y ago

This is a a video of some guy reading someone else's web site aloud. Please find a link to the actual web site being read. Thank you.

_rs 3y ago
It’s the first link in the video description: 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...
- Animats 3y ago
  That ends with: "Update: 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 she’s locked out." So none of this home shutdown actually happened. It's fake news.
  - mcv 3y ago
    So the guy was saved by dependency on two corporations instead of one. That fixes the monopolistic control issue, but not the remote disabling of devices and services that you paid for and are supposed to control.
  - Terretta 3y ago
    > So none of this home shutdown actually happened. It's fake news. Could it have happened? Put another way, does it matter whether fake or not to inform improvement?
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
Does that deserve a copyright strike?

baz00 3y ago

I closed my Amazon retail account recently because their automated customer service screwed up a warranty claim. The humans I finally talked to were useless. I realised at that point I was an inconvenience past making the initial sale. Why would I risk anything like a smart home on that level of service, support and customer care? AWS are only marginally better, despite being a high rolling enterprise customer.

shoulderfake 3y ago

[dead]

hkt 3y ago

Cloud connected smart homes are a terrible idea. Why anyone would pay to install surveillance devices in their homes is utterly beyond me.

thriftwy 3y ago

I wonder if they understand that they're basically firing half of their US audience, according to the people who they back politically. (Disclaimer: Not from US; popcorn grabbed)

akomtu 3y ago
This half is very conservative with tech, and owners of the big tech hate anything conservative.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  This half owns a lot of homes, though, more so than the other one, who is also less conservative about owning a home.

marcus_holmes 3y ago

I wonder if their Kindle stopped working too? This kind of shit is why I still advise everyone who asks me (as the tech guy in the family) not to use any home automation that is connected to the cloud.

timeon 3y ago
I also use other device than kindle and do not buy ebooks on amazon.

optimalsolver 3y ago

[flagged]

fdsafdassd 3y ago
[flagged]
rkangel 3y ago
I don't like racists either, but I don't understand how you don't draw the conclusion from this story that there was both centralisation of power and abuse of power. First - he wasn't racist. It was misheard. And second just because a company thinks you're racist they shouldn't be able to take reprisals because they don't have the appropriate checks and balances appropriate for that sort of power - we've all read the stories of Google shutting down people's accounts with no appeal. What you've got here is vigilante justice, misapplied to someone who's innocent. This should involve an appropriate system with appropriate checks and balances - like the justice system.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  I'm not sure this is unequivocally "vigilante justice". Because to me, it seems more like "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone." The intent of Amazon was not to disable the guy's smart home, or lock him out of his house. Amazon intended to deny him service across the board by suspending his account. Being logged out of Alexa is a side-effect of that, but we don't know if Amazon took an inventory of services he uses before they made the decision to suspend. So, if it were a real incident of racist abuse and Amazon suspended the account, would that matter? People can be denied government benefits if they act abusively toward a case worker. They can also be denied medical treatment and ejected from a hospital if they are abusive to HCPs there. (Exception for mental hospitals, where they just get locked down and sedated instead.) So does a company like this Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone? Or are they too deep and wide to exercise that right? If a company controls your digital life and holds most of your personal data, do they have the right to cut off your access with an AI-based decision? I'm not sure it's "vigilante justice" but it may be more like "racketeering".

grishka 3y ago

Why would anyone allow the smart home hub to connect to the internet? Just keep it in your LAN. You'll still have 99% of the functionality.

no_butterscotch 3y ago

Amazon has gotten too big. Last year I canceled my Prime and am doing my best to use alternatives. But it's become hard, I still sometimes use Amazon and pay for shipping or use the free long-ass shipping if it exists.

GoofballJones 3y ago

I have a dumb home. No smart thermostat. No smart doorbell. No cameras festooning the outside of my house. No smart TV. No smart home owner. Long ago, I saw a movie as a kid in the 1970s called Demon Seed, where this big computer gained consciousness and extended it's presence to a smart home (well, smart home with tech from the 1970s). It scared the heck out of me, even though seeing it now it's pretty tame...regardless of the whole impregnating a woman with it's child.

hef19898 3y ago
The only concession we have is a smart TV, try find dumb ones today. Oh, and a basically always disconnected, when not used, Alexa and a Google smart speaker I got for free once which I haven't seen in quite a while...
- GoofballJones 3y ago
  Oh I have a TV that's "smart", but like you it's not connected at all to my WiFi. It's just a dumb terminal to my AppleTV. On levels of trust, I would put the AppleTV above my old Nvidia Shield and MUCH higher than my old Roku box. My main gripe with smart devices is their sketchy software that may or may not have vulnerabilities in them and may or may not be diligently updated with security fixes by the company that makes them. If I can concentrate most things to one device...like the AppleTV, which gets updates all the time...then I can isolate problems. If I have to worry about a myriad of things throughout the house, that's something else.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Ours is network connected. But then it is a model than runs Amazon Fire TV natively, and nothing else from the TV set OEM. Wouldn't make much sense to not connect the TV, and connect the plugged in Fire TV stick... That being said, despite being rather happy with it (mostly, the storage runs full way too often for my taste), I'd rather have simply a dumb display.
Dr4kn 3y ago
I have a smart home and it works great, but it all runs locally. ZigBee for most devices, because it is an encrypted local mesh communication protocol. The things that use wifi have no internet connection. Home Assistant is open source and runs everything locally. If a vendor of any products doesn't support their ZigBee hub anymore I don't care. Home Assistant is my ZigBee Hub. If any cloud service is shut off I don't care, because nothing is in the cloud. If you build new KNX is great. It works with Home Assistant and it's just a bus system. You program it once and it works for decades.

seydor 3y ago

I see a lot of opportunity here to fight racism

Woshiwuja 3y ago

Disgusting fascist behaviour

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

OtomotO 3y ago

Another one PRO climate catastrophe! Let's produce even more e-waste please. Let's do our best to end this quick, maybe in the next turn of the wheel we'll get better cards (or smarter humans that can live with a "dumb" house)

glimshe 3y ago

If anyone is wondering why Free Software is important, that's a big reason right there. If you have a corporation in complete control of the computers in your home, they are not yours by definition. Arguably, your home is no longer yours if these computers are central to the functioning of your home. I'm always careful with going all-in on modern "ecosystems", like buying "everything Apple", "everything Google", having "all my data in XYZ Cloud" without some way to cut them out of the loop.

Anthony-G 3y ago

> Since it was a smart doorbell with a camera, he had a recording of exactly what happened so he was able to send that to Amazon and they reinstated his account. If this story is true, the Amazon customer was lucky that he didn’t have a Ring doorbell. Otherwise, he probably wouldn’t have been able to access the recording and would be in a Catch-22 situation. It could have taken much longer than a week to to get his home working again.

stevenjgarner 3y ago

I would like to push back a little on the IoT haters here. I assist in the management of a number of short-term rental homes. The short-term rental industry is enabled in large part because of IoT. For example, we use Wi-Fi enabled digital door locks to provide custom door codes for guests and cleaners. These codes can be managed and monitored remotely. More specifically, in one trial we implemented the (keyless) Google Nest x Yale Lock [1] - great when it was working, but locksmiths were called on more than one occasion when it was not. Then we had the epiphany to implement the (keyed) Yale Assure Lock Touchscreen with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth [2], which solved that problem giving us the fail normal desired outcome. It was only in talking with Yale tech support that we realized these are virtually the same locks (one keyed / one not), and despite a near absence of technical supporting information, they both worked just as well on Google Home. I cannot emphasize the fail normal requirement enough with IoT devices, as discussed elsewhere here. We similarly provision a large number of other IoT devices to improve guest experience including Nest thermostats, Nest Protect smoke and CO alarms, Chromecast Google TV, and (outside) Google Nest security cameras/floodlights. Most guests now require these features at a minimum. I apologize that this reads somewhat as a Google advertisement, and that is one of my problems with IoT and IMHO one of the main reasons for its lack of wider adoption - product lines are proprietary and there are no well-implemented standards for cross-vendor compatibility. For example, Amazon eero wifi nodes cannot be substituted with Google Nest Wifi nodes - they use incompatible proprietary mesh networking technology. [1] https://store.google.com/product/nest_x_yale_lock https://store.google.com/product/nest_x_yale_lock [2] https://shopyalehome.com/products/yale-assure-lock-touchscreen-with-wi-fi-and-bluetooth https://shopyalehome.com/products/yale-assure-lock-touchscre...

saurik 3y ago
You can implement the features you want for your rental home without the downsides we hate by merely doing end-to-end encrypted communication--and likely even peer-to-peer direct communication (and, if not, using a neutral third party to coordinate rather than the manufacturer)--from your computer to the device in question and requiring manual approval of firmware updates, which should not involve any kind of vendor signature requirement. The default assumption that the company selling the product should have complete control over the software running on the device at all times, that they should have complete control over usage and access of the device, and that they even should have complete visibility to all of the data collected by the device, is so ridiculous as to be downright egregious: it requires someone who has almost nothing but contempt for users--even if they want to claim they somehow are helping them "for their own good"--to even contemplate such an architecture.

boredumb 3y ago

I'm building a smart home currently into the old beat up house i'm fixing up! Home assistant is great, I bought almost all the sensors and cameras online and they operate over zigbee, Matrix server to act as an alert box and a ghetto "intercom" system... having lots of fun with it and most of that is from me refusing to use google or amazons smart home IoT-phone-home products. I'm sure there are things I'm missing out on but it's been a lot of fun hacking them all together on a little mini-pc I picked up.

anotherevan 3y ago

Remember that the "S" in "IoT" stands for "security".

mcv 3y ago

It's all about unfounded accusations, but even if the accusations are founded, if the person living there is the worst fucking racist who deserves to be shunned; that may be a valid reason for Amazon to stop delivering stuff to his home, and refuse to sell anything to him, but not to disable his entire home and disable the devices that he has already paid for. Once you've sold it, it shouldn't be yours anymore. Inviting this kind of surveillance into your home, where we're being policed by profit-driven corporations, is the biggest condemnation of this sort of IoT crap. Imagine if my car stops working if Toyota disapproves of something I say. Imagine I can't pay for food because of something I said. Pulling this sort of crap should be punished with heavy fines. And if companies are at the same time held responsible for the stuff that goes through their servers and that creates an impossible situation for them, then maybe they shouldn't be creating these sort of dependencies at all.

N19PEDL2 3y ago
Totally agree. Moreover, there could be people living in the same house who are not involved in the racism incident in any way but are still affected by Amazon's decision.
ipaddr 3y ago
A company refusing to deliver products because they are gay, racist or black is wrong
- Timon3 3y ago
  One of those is not like the other. Can you explain why you see them as similar?
  - JohnClark1337 3y ago
    [dead]
  - Supermancho 3y ago
    These terms (gay, black, racist) are arbitrary classifications that are just broad enough to be useful, but are often attributed due to narrow characteristics or specific behaviors. eg "acting <label>"

superhumanuser 3y ago

Score another one for the conspiracy theorists who predicted and warned us about this years ago.

npteljes 3y ago

Well, this is what it looks like when someone builds on another private entity's infrastructure. This kind of risk is built-in from the start, and as such, I think it must be considered before investing in it.

tenpies 3y ago

From the Youtube comments too: > My Amazon “community privileges” got suspended for “racism” after I correctly told a Chinese air filter company that their product was garbage. They false-flagged my review for racism. My review was not racist in any way. Suddenly, twenty years of my Amazon reviews (including long essays on academic books) got deleted Something to think about the next time you honestly review something on Amazon.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

jamesgreenleaf 3y ago

There should be laws & regulations around this type of thing. Critical devices that run your home should always be able to disconnect and continue to run. Any cloud-connected features should be entirely optional.

balderdash 3y ago

It seems that as a companies size, breadth of product, market, share, and reliance by the general population increases, that the burden of proof, and its ability to turn off its services on a whim should decrease, and customer protections should increase.

scioto 3y ago

And that is why I don't have any "smart" devices in my house. Except for my Internet-connected bathroom scale. It's been giving me the side-eye for a while now.

Anthony-G 3y ago

I had some doubts about the veracity of this story since there’s so little information in the linked article. It turns out that it is true – and was already submitted to Hacker News a number of times over the past month or so: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36348842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36348842 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36340095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36340095 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296250 The original article by the customer: 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... Also reported in The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/15/amazon_echo_disabled_allegation/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/15/amazon_echo_disabled_...

JohnFen 3y ago

To the greatest extent possible, it's best to avoid giving any corporation the ability to shut any part of your life down. I still don't understand why people are willing to rely on devices like this without having control over them.

fallinghawks 3y ago

I don't have smart home stuff at my own house except for some cameras, which aren't being used in an automated manner. I installed cameras, a water heater flood monitor, and a smart switch at a vacation home shared by me and my siblings. Sometimes things need rebooting and a smart switch lets me do that remotely. But things that can inadvertently lock you out or do something expensive with your HVAC are not for me.

LinuxBender 3y ago

Similar to how I can add cameras to ZoneMinder and keep all my data on-prem, is there a platform that people can move their home automation to and have full control over cloud access, ideally with a hardware compatibility list and preferably without having to hack the firmware? Also ideally light-weight enough to run on a RasPi or mini-pc. I assume this platform would also need to be able to make API calls only those I configure to Amazon, Walmart, CVS, VPS providers, Utility bills, IRS, etc... to purchase my 10,000 rolls of toilet paper so it should be vendor agnostic and must not talk when not expected to. reward the most affordable, reliable and unbiased vendors and not leak data

ghusto 3y ago

I understand a tech-enthusiasm driven deployment of "smart" devices in your home — not for me, you understand, but I get that people like shinies — but when is this going to end? Hasn't the novelty warn off for people yet? Or maybe it has for the first wave, and it's just going to take a while before everyone who's susceptible goes through the process of realising it's pointless?

Thoreandan 3y ago

Was surprised to see in the comments that Tay Zonday had his decades of Amazon book reviews deleted when a vendor flagged a negative review he wrote about an air filter as racist.

boneitis 3y ago

A first-party account was submitted a while back at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296250 I'm right there with everyone else who wants to raise a pitchfork and hop on the Amazon-critical bandwagon. But, I felt it worth pointing out back then and again here that the seemingly bizarre choice of doorbell response "Excuse me, can I help you?" left me unsurprised that the delivery driver "misheard" it and set off this round of media hoopla.