Jackson soon discovered that Amazon suspended his account because a Black delivery driver who’d come to his house the previous day had reported hearing racist remarks from his video doorbell. In a brief email sent to Jackson at 3 a.m., the company explained how it unilaterally placed all of his linked devices and services on hold as it commenced an internal investigation.
The accusations baffled Jackson. He and his family are Black. When he reviewed the doorbell’s footage, he saw that nobody was home at the time of the delivery. At a loss for what could have prompted the accusation of racism, he suspected the driver had misinterpreted the doorbell’s automated response: “Excuse me, can I help you?”
I think you are missing the point here. Yes, Amazon, blah blah blah. But technology and everyday life are increasing in their intersection. And things like the Equifax breach show, you don’t have to participate to be involved.
In most of everyday activities you have some form of legal recourse, save for many of the technical activities. In many cases, this is largely left to companies to offer recourse and aside from arbitration, you have little other rights offered to you to bring about civil suit. Like the guy’s photos, he took those photos. He has legal copyright over them, except when they’re hosted in the cloud the TOS of many services makes your legal copyright suddenly a joint ownership. This reduces your ability to exercise your copyright to get your photos back and increases the bar of evidence to entry for civil litigation. For the most part, you are at the whims of corporations to exercise a right the Constitution grants you (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8).
That’s the more general thing you should take away from this. You have rights granted to you, but because our legal system is largely silent on many digital aspects, you are barred in many cases to exercise your rights in the United States. For a lot of things, you lack legal recourse on something that everyday becomes more and more intertwined with your everyday life, whether you like it or not.
Yes, yes. It’s easy to look at this particular episode and indicate “well you shouldn’t use Amazon”. And that’s a fine take, but you’re missing the point the article is attempting to make. In general, there are a lot of rights granted to you that you don’t get to use because the law on how you use those rights in the court system is largely left up for companies to dictate. That is a really non-good position that lots of people have been yelling for our leaders in Government to address. When people yell, “we need to modernize our laws”, this is what they are talking about.
Our predecessors created protections for us citizens. And because our current leadership won’t translate those protections into the terms of modern society, companies are getting to dictate how, when, and where you get to exercise those protections our fore-bearers worked tirelessly for. You are having something stolen from you that it is easy to steal because so few actually need it, but those that need it are seeing the hard implications of that theft. And it will become more and more problematic as more and more things of our society require that technology. And some of it, you don’t get to have a say on if you’ll join in or not.
So it’s really important that “IN GENERAL” you remember that this is really, really, really important to everyone. Yes, this specific instance, just don’t use Amazon’s cloud services until they have been resolution processes, that are more transparent. But please, don’t loose sight of the bigger picture here that the article mentions.
FYI
https://slrpnk.net/comment/2772137
One of those rights is right to deny service. Just like you can be banned from here for hate speech, or harassment or what have you. I think youre getting twisted around, yes technology and tech companies become more involved in everyday life, but none without alternatives, which also grow everyday. We’re talking about how this specific case isnt the worst, its just Amazon and the guy can use other services. But thats every case. Every case will involve one company exercising its right to not provide service, and the user being able to go to some alternative service.
Locking you out of your data should however not be allowed. They should be forced to give him a chance to migrate everything off their services.
No company holding physical items you own on your behalf would be allowed to seize them without warning and compensation.
In this case it’s the “suspect” of racism, in which I think we all agree should not directly lock you out of your account, but perhaps give you a warning.
But what if it’s suspected illegal actions or content? Like them catching the home server being part of a DDoS attack, or overhearing signs of child abuse / identifying possible child pornography content or noticing illicit gun ownership. Their AI will determine that there’s a 97% chance of that being the case.
I wonder if that would change things.
If such a system is not allowed to block usage, it will probably at least inform the local police.Your home setup will in most cases eventually act as a panopticon.