Amazon accuses customer of racism and shuts down their smart home

Ok, we've moved most comments to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296250, which (I think?) has the original source.

Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The lack of paragraph breaks makes it hard to read but: https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=NfiIXooD77s

A customer who has Amazon's smart devices in his home got locked out of his account. The reason given was that amazon's delivery driver misheard the automated answer of the doorbell for a racist comment. He was locked out of using all his 'smart home' features for days until Amazon gave him access back to his account without an apology or anything of that sort. Basically, if he didn't have proof of the interaction he would've lost access indefinitely.

The video is just him reading a medium post, linked in the description, with a bit of commentary - https://medium.com/@bjax_/a-tale-of-unwanted-disruption-my-w...

Summary provide by Claude via the Youtube transcript:

The narrator shares a story from someone named Brandon Jackson whose smart home devices stopped working after Amazon locked his account due to a delivery driver's claim of receiving racist comments from Jackson's doorbell camera. Even after submitting video evidence showing this was false, it took Amazon days to unlock Jackson's account and his devices to start working again.

The narrator argues that incidents like this show why you shouldn't give companies control over infrastructure in your home. If a company employee decides to act unreasonably, they could cut off access to your own property and devices. The narrator recommends keeping as much home infrastructure as possible disconnected from company servers. He gives examples of how he runs a computer to play music through an amplifier that isn't connected to the internet. He argues people got on just fine without "smart homes" connected to company servers and don't really need them.

The key takeaway is that connecting critical systems in your home to company servers means giving up control to those companies in a way that could be subject to unreasonable actions. It's better to keep as much infrastructure as possible disconnected and self-contained.

Louis Rossman is not a podcaster. He's the face of the entire right-to-repair movement and one of the most respected people in tech. Also, having another person review the footage is a meaningful contribution over just linking to the Medium article.

It's not "some podcaster", it's not tabloid fodder, please unflag. Edit: To expand, Lois Rossman is the face of the "Right to repair" movement, and hand in hand with that goes to have control over the things you've bought in other ways than just to repair them.

I'd want to downvote this, but in absence of that option I'll comment here instead to show I disagree. First, although he's indeed also reading the article, it's not like that is the only thing he is doing. He is adding a broader perspective to it. Secondly, the tabloid fodder accusation here is really not any value here, please don't make HN commentary second into something where they just sling random accusations around. Third, I agree that it's not just some podcaster as stated by the other commenters.

Also, the first line of the video description of the video is a link to the medium article.