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?”

  • ChiefSinner@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Just another reminder that you don’t own anything digital - companies do. Forgo these cheap cloud products, use hardware that you can control

    • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      It’s a huge stretch to say you don’t own “anything” digital. But yeah, don’t buy any physical products from Amazon. Apple is next on the offenders list, and Google is also dangerous if you don’t know how to navigate it.

      • ChiefSinner@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I mean, if I buy a game on steam and valve goes belly up, how do I retain my games? Game companies were all too eager to stop selling physical discs for PC games and instead give you a code for you to redeem. And you can’t sell it after you play it like with console games, because it goes against most PC game companies’ terms of service (edit - …to sell your account)

        If you buy a security camera that is only available through the cloud and the company stops paying for the cloud service, all you have is a paper weight

    • Adalast@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This is literally why the instant I found out about Stable Diffusion being open-source I set out on a quest for one I could run locally and control. Fuck the censors, fuck all these fly-by-night frat bro get-rich-quick apps that charge you to harvest your data and steal your prompt writing for their “research”. Fuck it all. I have a GPU. I have time. I use it myself and control all of it. I even have sandboxed it into an isolated environment so nothing can escape. Fun times.

      You need a goddamned CS degree just to use something fun and know you are secure.