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“Hey kids, be careful. If Alexa hears you say the wrong thing, nothing in the house will work anymore.”
They say that a fool and his cloud are easily parted.
We talk a lot about deplatforming, but when a single corporation doesn’t just control a site you use, but controls most of your life, everything from your doorbell to your vacuum, your music and your lightbulbs, and it decides that your politics are bad, you’ve got problems.
That’s exactly the situation that people put themselves in when they rely on Amazon or Google Home to control their smart home only to realize that they no longer control their home.
A touchy corporation that celebrates Pride Month and BLM all year round does. Beware of offending it.
A package was delivered to my house on Wednesday, May 24, and everything seemed fine. The following day, however, I found that my Echo Show had signed out, and I was unable to interact with my smart home devices…
The representative told me I should have received an email, which I indeed found in my inbox. It was from an executive at Amazon. As I dialed the number provided in the email, I half-wondered if Amazon was experiencing some issues and I was unwittingly falling into a scam.
When I connected with the executive, they asked if I knew why my account had been locked. When I answered I was unsure, their tone turned somewhat accusatory. I was told that the driver who had delivered my package reported receiving racist remarks from my “Ring doorbell”
Brandon Jackson, a Microsoft software engineer, who is writing this is actually black.
I reviewed the footage and confirmed that no such comments had been made. Instead, the Eufy doorbell had issued an automated response: “Excuse me, can I help you?” The driver, who was walking away and wearing headphones, must have misinterpreted the message. Nevertheless, by the following day, my Amazon account was locked, and all my Echo devices were logged out.
Since everything is centralized, losing your Amazon account also kills the smart home setup meaning that everything from thermostats to lights to vacuums might not work anymore.
However, I question why my entire smart home system had to be rendered unusable during their internal investigation. It seems more sensible to impose a temporary delivery restriction or purchasing ban on my account. Submitting video evidence from multiple angles right after my initial call with the executive appeared to have little impact on their decision to disable my account.
The short answer is because Amazon wields nearly unlimited power and sees no reason to compromise when cracking down. A single account provides better control and more leverage to punish anyone it doesn’t like.
That’s something to consider when purchasing Amazon devices.
Offend Amazon and your Kindle won’t work, your books, music and movies will be inaccessible and you may even have trouble getting in and out of your house.
Jackson writes, “due to this experience, I am seriously considering discontinuing my use of Amazon Echo devices and will caution others about this incident.”
Seriously considering.
This is a dystopia but we’re also doing it to ourselves. Amazon didn’t force us to hook up our entire lives to it. It just seemed convenient. But those who can give you convenience can also take it away in a nanosecond.
”It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” So writes Orwell in the first sentence of his novel 1984. But what did he mean? No not military time–that would mean the clocks would have to strike twenty-four at midnight. Too awkward and noisy even for a collectivist tyranny. Rather the first sentence demonstrates a disordered society, where even time itself is out of synchrony with tradition. Where has the tradition of liberty vanished away to? How does an AMAZON clerk have the power to monitor the speech of a citizen? Does the clerk who disconnected this person’s home have any principles ? Ideas like the 1st Amendment give expression to self-evident laws of nature regarding the rights of mankind. The technocrats at AMAZON are not rulers of this civilization; if these ancient truths are too hard to follow, they are free to depart from the United States of America. We are free to stop paying them to oppress us. Let our dollars follow freedom not tyranny…
The thirteen introduced a dissonant element at the very beginning. Nothing is fixed or true in this world.
And nothing is fixed and true in ours. But the Amazon dystopia is as much Kafka as it is Orwell. People are accused, tried and convicted in secret corporate channels without ever knowing what they were accused of, what the penalty is and how to appeal it.
When the clock strikes thirteen, it calls into question, not just the last strike, but all those that came before.
“I am seriously considering discontinuing my use of Amazon products”… too late. You are a drone in the matrix, a fly entangled in the web, never to escape, because group- think is so comfortable, it’s so warm and cosy……and besides, what will you do when your friends discover you are no longer “connected”…?
Middle class convenience is a more secure prison than any gulag.
That’s what Americans are discovering as the Europeans did before them.
Excellent point. I’ve read a fair number of accounts of people who could have escaped Germany during WW2 but didn’t (my prof neighbor and his grad students had a good collection of such books, some of which they wrote).
There is no middle class. It was a target of the DS, and WEF. And they took it out.
C one nine, lockdowns and vax mandates. Businesses went down and never reopened jobs evaporated.
The gov had no such authority, yet usurped the power….
The sheeple chose stimulus and remote telecommuting over rebuilding. Ignorant employers forced vax. Those employers have blood on their hands. (You idiots) Those vaxed that remain alive, wont be much longer. Theres your middle class.
We are a 3rd world nation. all thanks to power hungry money lusting dirty politicians.
All 388 members. The certifiers of the electoral college .
Mom&pops are gone. Big box, amazoid wokemart, torget are you choices.
Someone throw me a rope.
Who the F is dumb enough to give up that much control of their lives? I try to control as much of mine as possible. I don’t care much if I screw things up. At least they’re my screw ups and I can correct them.
I don’t even like handing temporary control of my computer to a technician, in order to update or install an app.Does anyone remember an old Julie Christie movie called DEMON SEED?
Several years ago a friend gave me one of those things as a gift. My kids asked it dumb questions for three days, my wife yelled at it for three days because it didn’t understand her accent-then I threw it in the trash.
Surely there is some applicable law…Amazon has deep pockets….so where are the lawyers? Looks to me like there’s money to be made in a class action suit somewhere…
Probably is,if you can afford to pursue it for the years they can keep it tied up in court. With the liberal attitudes of so many judges there is no guarantee you would win, considering how they continue to chip away at our 1st amendment rights
Maybe,.
Likely there’ll be mandatory arbitration and the 200 page user agreement probably allows Amazon to do anything short of shooting you in the head and turning your body into mulch.
Maybe.
Amazon fought and lost in court arguing that they had no responsibility for fires started by the products they sell. According to them they’re just a middleman platform for China.
They also allow Chinese companies to call themselves names that include UK but when one looks into the details (not that easy) one discovers a Chinese supplier lying about their location.
Yeah, one always has to take into account that what they are buying might come from China, or a Chinese company.
Even buying an American politician is no surety of not getting a Chinese entity.
Both my parents lived to 92 without any of these devices. Goes to show, you don’t need them to live.
My entire house is one by one single smart device and I refuse to block myself
Seriously considering, run dont walk away. Disconnect every amazon product.
Why is Amazon silencing “Black Voices” should have been the response from the guy whose house was shut down… Throw their own logic against them and watch them scramble to backtrack
He could have gotten a multi-million dollar payout and a very nice job with them. But apparently his mistake is having dignity.
“I’m sorry, Dave, but I’m afraid I can’t allow you to do that.”
You have to be a certain age to understand your excellent comment.
But racism can be a blessing when you’re ringing a doorbell. I’m reminded of a true story I read in the book “Self-Made Man” by Nora Vincent.
A young. black, door-to-door, salesman would sell his product or service in well-to-do, upper-middle-class, neighborhoods. His best sales were when a small child would answer the door at which point a great smile would cross his face. He would crouch down and tell the toddler, “Will you do me a wonderful favor little darling, will you yell as loud as you can, ‘Momma, there’s a N-word at the door, there’s an N-word at the door!”
The mother would always come running, completely flustered and effusively apologetic, and buy everything he had to sell.
In a related matter, here in Washington State a bill (HB 1333) is under consideration that will create a commission empowered to identify instances of “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “radicalization” amongst the general public. At some point, the intervention of law enforcement and/or medical personnel will be triggered.
Public testimony when the bill was introduced indicated that the primary targets of this bill will be conservative and Christian speech. Since planning illegal acts, or issuing threats, is already illegal, it seems that this bill will criminalize or medicalize speech that does not rise to that level. It is the views themselves that will be deemed extremist, and it is unclear exactly what monitoring apparatus will be employed to identify “problematic” speech. Perhaps the technology described in this article will be one of the methods.
Everyone who uses a smartphone, let alone a smart device of any kind, already has a monitoring device tracking them.
Most crimes of passion these days are easily solved with smartphone data.
Washington is a vanguard. totalitarian state, surpassing even California. it is a backwater no one pays attention to enabling leftists to enact and perfect their ideas before they are exported nation wide. For example, mail in only, the latest is cap & trade. this has caused fuel prices to soar despite assurances it would not.
Corruption & communism have been endemic there even before it became a state.
Big Brother Amazon here comes 1984
Words of Wisdom. Thanks Daniel!
This incident was triggered by a human sending an email. Soon, if not already, the “smart” home devices will always be listening and watching and will automatically report you and shut you down.
On a side note. the litigation will be interesting when some is shutdown and dies as a result of not being able to reach the EMS.
They’re already always listening and taping.
Let them into your house and this is what you’re letting inside.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-irobot-robot-vacuums-artificial-intelligence-training-data-privacy/
No Soviet citizen was spied on as thoroughly as people who buy smart devices and services.
Turn off Alexa Turn off Siri Turn off Hey Goolag. Turn them all off.
Lol I hope every single person who gets their automated smart cars and homes gets exactly what they deserve. Get Culled by The Man, worthless brainlets.
You left out quite a bit from the Medium article this was taken from. Might want to update it to provide the relevant details.
Never let technology control your life.
Amazon “echo devices?” Yeah, I’ll take a huge pass on those. My cell phone and e-mail account are bad enough, not that I have anything interesting or profitable to spy on.