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 could understand suspending deliveries to keep drivers out of those situations as it’s investigated. But what the actual fuck is going on where they suspended the family devices? What an actual joke. First off, Alexa is dogshit, and now you advertise that you’ll just cut users off on every platform at a moment’s notice? Why would anybody use it going forward?
Because the vast majority of users will never ever run into a situation remotely close to what happened here.
Not even sure what security matters in this context though. This isn’t a security issue.
Right, we should always ignore a problem because it doesn’t affect me personally. There’s never been an issue with that ever in history. I mean, no way they would do this for something like non-payment or excessive returns on your Amazon.com account, right? No way this system of turning off all of the expensive devices you’ve purchased from them could ever turn bad, right?
This family didn’t even do the thing that they were accused of, but everything was disabled immediately. That’s an acceptable policy to you? That’s a policy that makes sense? What if you had one of their shitty fire phones? Now your mobile phone doesn’t work because somebody thinks they overheard you say something on your camera?
To add to that, it was a black family and they obviously had no problem going after a black family.
A cloud company removing your access to your security system while maintaining it for themselves definitely is a security issue
This is absolutely a security issue, because the company controlling all your security devices can disable them at their pleasure. You don’t have any control over the security device that you have paid for. I fail to see how you are unable to realize that’s a problem.