> 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, I thought he was literally locked out and how "smart locks" sound like a bad idea due to failure modes like this. Not that he couldn't use his smart nonsense.
It was not just that. Even if it was just that; Amazon has no right to disable an account or services unilaterally like that with little recourse from the user.
> Amazon has no right to disable an account or services unilaterally like that with little recourse from the user.
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.
>Amazon has no right to disable an account or services unilaterally like that with little recourse from the user.
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).
Tell me you don't understand the difference between morality and legality without... you know the drill.
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.
You're right; but I meant that in a colloquial manner. What I'm saying is services like these that are becoming as indispensable as utilities should have a system in place for lodging complaints and disputes and mechanisms to resolve them. The city cannot cut my water just because I yell epithets at the mayor, whether they agree or disagree. Now, sure, this is more of a civil matter but due to the importance of the services, they should have proper mechanisms in place for these kinds of things, otherwise, it's he said, she said and both customers and employees can willy nilly accuse each other of transgressions and have services suspended or employment terminated, etc., unfairly and without evidence in many cases.
Title is ridiculous clickbait. “Locked out of smart home” implies a lot more than “had to manually flip switches for a week”. It’s a shame, bc this is obviously an insane thing for Amazon to do, and worth discussing.
I mean, depending on the scope of what he was actually locked out of, doesn't Amazon own Ring, which could well include your video security, your alarm system and so on? That's beyond a mild inconvenience.
The (likely less obvious) thing the author meant was that the person in question was locked out of the "smart" parts of their home. But yes, the title is clearly bad and you can already see confused people in the comments here.
Well, Amazon did try to lock him out of his smart home, and there is zero evidence that they would have cared had that meant him being homeless for a week. It just happens that he luckily was technically competent enough to have a flexible setup and know what to do with it.
The degree of inconvenience to him is just a minor indicental detail that depends on how much smart stuff he happened to install. Maybe its not everything today but there anyone who doesn’t think that will increase in the future? This is a timely wake up call not to trust anything internet connected.
Another example demonstrating that when functionality in your life is provided by ongoing, private subscription-based services, they can be disrupted at the slightest whim of the corporate behemoth providing them. At least this guy was able to get some redress after abasing himself before the corporate apparatus.
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.
Ok, so from his blog post, not locked out of his house, just locked out of his Alexa...
"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.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned in the comments here yet: once again, this shows the risk of using the same account for more than one purpose.
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.
After reading the linked blog post ... it seems the person was not literally "locked out" as in prevented from physically entering his own home.
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?
Imagine if it locked an elder or child in there, or animals requiring care. Also, if food were on the stove and the house caught fire who's at fault here, the API?
That's a dramatic lie, even for clickbait. He was not locked out of his smart home - his Amazon smart devices were disabled. Still something perfectly valid to write a story about. There really needs to be some kind of stronger mechanism for punishing this level of clickbait.
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.
Do NOT give control of your home or domicile to tech giants. Even if you work for them. Giving up your domain to another is essentially giving them the keys and you a code. You are no longer in control of your house, you are no longer in control of your belongings, you are no longer in control of your life. Don’t do it.
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?
> 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.
smartphones started out as a gimmick, neat fun toy, barely worth it. I never saw needing one to run an app deal with the government, for example.
..
Smart home now is not smart home in 5 years is not smart home in 10. You could still be correct, we'll see, I guess.
Yeah, 100%. It's why I'll never use a Uber type service for my day to day transport needs, and will make sure any cars I get* don't require accounts, internet access, etc to function.
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.
- 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
> Using a car at all is giving up control to cops.
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).
I’m pretty blasé about control of my digital data, but the one place I won’t compromise is with smart home stuff. Run everything locally, or at least everything important. Use it as a convenience layer on top of physical control. Don’t ever rely on the cloud.
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.
Certainly your prerogative. I get a lot of value out of running Home Assistant (open source) + Zwave lights (local only + industry standard + physical switches for everything) + things like a Bluetooth controlled valve on my hose spigot that's underneath the deck.
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.
We have some big problems to solve this decade. This hints at what is essentially the capitalist version of a “social credit score” (or at least leans in that direction), and is deeply concerning. It goes hand-in-hand with credit card companies holding immense power over businesses, and when coupled with other trends like the bulk purchasing of consumer data by the government, unchecked expansion of ML/AI, etc. it feels like the tech industry is on a precipice of sorts. A subtle push and we descend into an authoritarian techno-dystopia…or maybe we’re already there.
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.
> Due to this experience, I am seriously considering discontinuing my use of Amazon Echo devices
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.
This man has patience of a sage. He's considering not using Amazon devices? I would had thrown all of it by now. Poor man locked himself in a digital jail
I was astonished with that phrasing too. It immediately takes out all the impact of his rage. You take away all of your services for a week and he's only considering not using them anymore? It's the empties threat I've heard in a long while :-(
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.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. You explicitly do not own any of the devices or the services they provide in this context. It's good the guy realizes now the way forwards is running software he controls on computers that are his property. It's too bad that as a software engineer he didn't realize this beforehand like he should have been able to.
I'm just now starting to compile together components to start building out my own 'smart home' via zigbee + home-assistant on a local laptop. Click bait or not it's a funny little reminder why i'm not going with the off the shelf systems tied to increasingly insane tech companies.
Had the same experience when I was setting up mine.
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.
The important lesson here is: never commit to an ecosystem. Always be ready to hit eject and move to a competitor without a second thought. I keep too broadband accounts. I disconnect and reconnect the other at the slightest annoyance, like a fee to fix bad signal, delayed repairs, etc, you're out. Amazing how quickly they come back begging. I also put virtual debit cards on most subscriptions. Easy to just stop paying, no credit reporting issues, no hunting for account cancellation pages. It takes some work, but being a subscription/provider nomad pays off.
Racism is the de-facto state religion of the United States – so people who are not Americans need to understand this as in he is accused of heresy and being a heretic. Which is the worst crime of all in a religious society and in the eyes of zealots.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296250