Blocked from Amazon Alexa for a week after racism accusation by delivery driver
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
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
> 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.
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.
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).
The post you're replying to was making a moral statement about what Amazon should and should not be allowed to do - not what they legally can do. The current world of "shoot first and ask questions never" on the Internet is not socially acceptable at the level of control and ownership that large tech companies have over you.
But then again, tech companies operate on one proposition, to wit: that there are certain parties that the ToS protects but does not bind, and that there are certain parties that the ToS binds but does not protect.
Still, it is a good lesson on control.
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-w...
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.
"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."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.
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.
He could have died if he had a serious illness that required meds.
edit: I read the article
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.
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?
It's a malicious actor's picnic.
Somebodies in some chain of policy creation may be fired.
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.
And learned nothing from the experience
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?
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.
It only takes one mistake, one corporate screwup or one misunderstanding/vindicative asshole and hey, your means of getting to work at a reasonable time is gone. That's too much of a risk to take.
* I don't currently use a car, but that's simply because the town I'm in is very walkable.
It's not like you're in any more control vs. cops without a car at your disposal, it's just a tool. But you bet your ass the more automated cars become, the more options cops (and the state in general) will have to remotely take control of their operation.
But cops can just as effectively be a problem for pedestrians, cyclists, riders of public transportation... Some of my worst police interactions have been on public transportation. They seem particularly keyed up and predisposed to assume you're poverty scum committing a crime in that context IME (BART police).
- Cops actually have to care about the justice system in some way, so won't usually take the car if it's not connected to a crime
- Because of the above, there is at least theoretically a way to get it back via the legal system
- They have to physically go and get the car
- The car still physically works even if there's a court order/arrest warrant/whatever.
With a company where you might 'rent' the car on the other hand:
- There's no justice system aspect, and they can refuse service for any (non) reason. That could be anything from "we don't like you much" (perhaps because you exposed their CEO's dodgy behaviour or acted as a whistleblower) to "having you as a customer is a PR nightmare" (person on social media claimed you said/did something inappropriate) to "computer says no" (technical glitch, system downtime, etc).
- Getting it back requires either enough social media outrage (like with Google account problems) or a costly lawsuit
- They could either stop the car from working via remote means like disabling the account needed to login, or blacklist your address from the system so their vehicles don't stop there
- If there's a problem, you're fubar. At best you can hack or jailbreak the system to get it working, at worst you have no vehicle at all
Especially if you work for them. And even more so if you are not a member of a trade union that will (help) protect you from your employer.
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.
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.
> 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-w...
I'm concerned that it distorts people's thinking about the nature of the system and the business relationship.
I'm not willing to cloud-connect anything for home automation, for the usual obvious reasons.
But if good voice control were only possible via cloud services, I could at least understand the temptation.
I can't speak to quality because I haven't tried it, but Home Assistant is focused on local voice control for the entire year: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/04/27/year-of-the-vo...
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.
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.
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.
Thanks.
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.
He’s still using it ?
What a nothingburger
I don't think you do.
It caused enough relatable pain to stick in people's minds, but nobody died.
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.