Thanks for the summary but you're burying the lede - what the hell is a racist door bell?
Short summary - Someone had tied in most of their home automation to Alexa and found their account cancelled suddenly one day. They went through the automated recovery systems and were told to contact support, which they did. Support ended up transferring them to an Amazon exec (let's assume "manager") who told them their account was disabled because an Amazon delivery driver reported that someone said something racist to them over their video doorbell (which wasn't a Ring, ironically).
Upon investigating, checking cameras, logs, etc,, the owner determined that (a) no one was home at the time of the delivery, (b) the driver was wearing headphones, (c) the doorbell had done an automated, "Hello, how can I help you?" response to the driver as they were walking away (presumably ring-and-dash or drop-and-dash delivery, as usual).
The driver had apparently, with the headphones on, completely misunderstood.
It took over a week to get Amazon to review all the evidence and reactivate the account. No apology at that point (although I believe I saw they subsequently have).
That's a bad look for Amazon, and the Youtuber makes a valid point that it's a bad idea to trust control of your home to a company that will make such boneheaded decisions.
IMHO, the only correct response for Amazon here is firing at least two people involved in the debacle, apologizing publicly, and promising to review and adapt their policies in response to the incident. Any halfway decent PR department at anything other than a mega-monopoly would be scurrying to do exactly that, but not Amazon apparently.
The idea that after a mistake companies should fire people leads to company cultures that are overall worse for everyone, including customers/users. Demand that they apologize, even that they give compensation, but not firing.
This whole asking for punishment is what actually drives a culture in which these kinds of things do happen more frequently, because everyone involved just wants to cover their asses.
- A customer can be mistakenly called a racist
- Their home automation systems they bought and paid for disabled
- Any digital content (Kindle books, Amazon Prime Video purchases, Audible books, etc.) they bought (sorry, "licensed") revoked.
- It takes more than a week to resolve after being provided with clear evidence of the company's mistake. I mean, good grief, at least the manager/executive should have reactivated the customer's account during the review process, but they opted for "guilty until we've taken our sweet time reviewing the evidence and make sure they're innocent".
- After all that, the customer isn't even offered an apology, much less compensation.
This isn't just a "mistakes and failures happen" situation. Failures and mistakes occurred at multiple points in this process and along the decision chain, and apparently no one involved had the common sense to break out of the resulting insanity-loop.
If Amazon hadn't taken that extreme step in the first place, the stakes wouldn't be so high, and there would be less reason to discipline the employee (for the record I don't think they should be fired in any case).
And yes, I recanted on the 'firing" part, but I still feel that Amazon's "resolution" here was weak-sauce compared to the "extreme" action taken in the first place. At this point, I'm guessing they wish they'd offered the customer some minor token (say 2 years of free Prime at a minimum) compensation in return for an NDA on the topic. 20/20 hindsight ;-)
Firing people for negligence in similar situations would likely have had just such an effect.
in reality it was a standard automated response that the customer happen record from another camera but they had to prove to amazon there was no racist comment made, and it took 1 or 2 weeks for them to unsuspend the account
During that time all of their Amazon Devices (echo, alexa automation, etc) were also non-functional
It is possible to do better. Valve does what should be the absolute minimum; tracking community forum bans separately from anticheat bans, neither of which stops you from accessing single-player content you paid for.
Great way of not-selling those.
I already not-bought Kindle because of the Orwell debacle way back when. Not-buying any echo/alexa stuff is clearly the way to go too. I just buy from the store occasionally.
Same for Google properties, I don't do squat on anything other than Gmail, don't want that messed up.
Perhaps a door bell that grew up in a well-off (maybe even a gated) community that learned to fear people that are different?