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?”
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This should be read and understood by everyone and everyone needs to cancel their smart devices from Amazon. The company needs to be broken up.
We should also be able to delete apps on our devices. I have an LG TV that keeps wanting me to use Alexa, but I’m not positive it’s not doing its shitty thing anyway because I can’t delete it.
Man that huge one for me. Samsung phones have so much bolated wear and you can’t delete the apps. Also should be illegal to add games to my device after an update.
Use your wallet. Don’t buy products like that.
Which products don’t have that? I’m seriously asking, I would buy those.
Fairphone?
Maybe? It seems like from their site that they’re more interested in saving the planet but it is bare bones. It doesn’t really make any declarations on that front.
It doesn’t come with preloaded shit though, so in that sense it’s a good option.
So, you would have to root kit it, right? I’m not sure I trust myself to be able to do it. I guess I could try it on an old phone or something.
Disconnect the tv from the internet. Use an AppleTV or Nvidea Shield.
The Motorola phones I’ve been buying for ages are usually real light on bloat. Worst I had was having to remove Facebook from my phone using CLI commands (I think with adb?)
Pixels…
That’s probably more on the carrier than Samsung themselves. I’ve genuinely never had an issue like that since switching to an unlocked device.
When reading about “smart” thermostat. It has been found that these would listen even though there is no account is linked nor it is activated.
I already did this by never getting smart devices.
It’s increasingly difficult to get a TV nowadays that isn’t “smart”.
Don’t connect it to the Internet
That’s easier said than done. I’ve had TVs that wouldn’t work unless TOS were accepted and I’ve had TVs scan for open networks.
I’m at the point of opening TVs to disconnect the wireless antennas.
Remember that if a TV is connecting to random WiFi spots, it is breaking hacking laws if it logs into someone else’s unsecured WiFi where you don’t have permission to join. Permission, not security measures like passwords, is the key part that defines the legality or otherwise of what you are doing
I see what you’re saying but you give up Netflix, Hulu, and screencasting. It’s an actual sacrifice.
You can connect other devices to your TV, like anything from a Nintendo Switch to an entire laptop/PC. Obviously they have their own privacy issues, but at least on a real computer you have some agency.
I just checked the pricing on OLED monitors, do they go on sale?
It doesn’t have to be a monitor. The computer doesn’t care what the other end of the cable calls itself.
Sometimes occasionally but they’re probably never going to be cheap. Too hard/expensive to manufacture which is why folks like Samsung keep trying really hard with quantum dot LED panels.
That being said, I regret nothing about purchasing my LG C9 OLED TV a couple years ago. Works fantastic, looks fantastic and I pretty much never use the built in UI for anything by going to a Nvidia Shield for my content/streaming needs. I think the LG C series does an excellent job and it occasionally goes on sale during holidays/Black Friday.
You missed the point but also accidentally found it. The point you missed, as others have replied, is that a TV and a monitor both work as PC displays.
But the point you accidentally found is that monitors are pretty much TVs without the smart tv bs added in. They are priced like TVs would be if they weren’t making money from them in other ways, like getting paid for preinstalled apps and selling harvested data.
There’s cheap devices you can get to connect to the expensive device to do that for you. That way the expensive device never takes a turn for the worse.
Nvidia Shield. Or another Android TV set top box. You’re welcome.
I don’t recommend any Android TV box anymore that isn’t from a big brand, which pretty much leaves the Shield and Chromecast with Google TV. All those no-name Amazon boxes are lousy with spyware.
I ended up just getting a big monitor.
Hmmmm, that’s a good option I hadn’t thought of.
I have two TVs. One is an small 720p set we keep in the bedroom with a connected Chromecast, and the other is a 1080p “smart” TV, but they made the mistake of building a Chromecast into it, so we literally never use the “smart” features and just cast from a phone or computer.
I don’t care if that’s “low resolution.” I grew up with CRT TVs. 1080p is terrific as far as I’m concerned.
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I have a couple of smart bulbs and switches and a couple of wyze cams around but I don’t want or need a smart doorbell, thermostat, etc. I like being able to turn off our bedroom light from my watch or phone and the smart switches work well for devices that need to be plugged in where the actual power cable is hard to reach.
I would love to get rid of my smart devices from amazon/Google but I have yet to find a single plug and play device that allows me to control all my lights, plant humidifiers, aquariums, TV, and whole house music by voice that isn’t from them or even better FOSS.
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
There’s a reason anybody even remotely familiar with computer security will tell you shit like this is a bad idea.
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100% untrue. Most experts I know without an agenda don’t really have any issues with them in a personal usage scenario.
Yeah okay. Pretty sure you know a lot of experts.
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No offense, I’m sure you’re probably not lying, maybe… but uh, that post gives off such heavy copy-pasta energy that I feel like that was intentional. Was it?
Chill out crappy redditor. You don’t need to be rude. It wasn’t me to went for the milk and left you ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Okay you’re an security expert, we get it. Unfortunately we don’t have gold here to award you, so that you can keep that erection for longer…
👌👍🤡
Unrelated topic but Reddit still exists. You can go back there any time.
Egh I’m interested in seeing this place evolve.
Laws need to be made against this shit ASAP. No company has a right to lock people out of their homes.
Yeh that’s very dystopian
Reasons I try my hardest to use FOSS. This kind of shit is the stuff of nightmares.
ITT: people missing the point of the article
it would be helpful if you
A) Told us what ITT means B) Explained what you think people are missing
A) A 5 second Google will tell you. It’s common internet lingo. B) I believe what they are implying the point of the article is, is that letting one company have control over your physical devices is a dystopian nightmare.
The irony of your downvotes re: a common initialization in the exact subculture this community is focused on… Just how many boomers are here, anyhow? 🤣🤦🏼♂️
I’ve been on the internet since 92 and never heard ITT before but I guess TIL
I think the first time I saw that was on PHPbb. When people were still doing “first” as comments.
You’ve been lucky in a way. Missing it for over at least 20 years. It’s like never having seen “ROTFLOL”.
Edit: just realized nobody ITT answered the question so at least I will: “In This Thread”.
Same here, been active on Discord and Telegram, and a small amount of Reddit, I don’t use the cancers called FB, X(Twitter), Tik Tok, or Instagram, and I’d never seen ITT till just now… Maybe it’s used on that crap social media I listed. I haven’t seen it used here on Lemmy either.
Reddit is where I’ve seen it. Usually for pithy remarks about the comments in a given thread
OK it’s more a Reddit thing it appears and the RRs (Reddit Refugees) need to maintain a comfort level and familiarity, that’s fine. But never good in life to use terms that may not be understood by your audience, and definitely not good to assume that everyone understands those terms and belittle or be condescending if someone doesn’t understand.
OK I always hated Reddit, never really used it much… Only a couple subs for apps I use, mainly to get updates from the Dev, and help a few dummies sometimes. I’ve been much more active here on Lemmy and haven’t noticed that.
OK boomer
OK loser
ITT has been around since the concept of threads existed. Early 90s at least. Very common. It’s odd you’ve never seen it before.
Racist Doorbell is the name of my new surf/punk band.
The pearks of iot
I just switched to reolink and am working to set up self hosting for this reason
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Hmm definitely a concern but please done make this so dramatic.
“a company arbitrarily decided a person isn’t allowed to use the things they have bought and paid for, essentially stealing his money by not providing the good or service that was paid for, it’s totally fine”
-You
Definitely a huge concern, but Amazon didn’t erase this guy :P In a very real sense, this guy was fine and was still able to use most of his tech via Siri integration. I’m actually kind of glad Amazon is trying to shut down services for bigots.
I’m actually kind of glad Amazon is trying to shut down services for bigots.
How exactly was he a bigot?
He wasn’t, but if the head of the kkk got a complaint the ban would have stuck for much longer
As it turned out, he wasn’t. But when they stopped servicing him, they had every reason to believe that he was.
Do you continue to service a customer whose behavior is otherwise unacceptable until you’re absolutely sure he’s a bigot? Or do you abide by your legal obligation to protect your workers from such behavior?
I don’t know if Amazon did the worst thing here, but I don’t know that the best thing is far off from what they did.
Who at Amazon would be hurt by a bigot using their Echo or doorbell? Stopping deliveries sure but this is a couple of steps further.
Who at Amazon would be hurt by a bigot using their Echo or doorbell?
That’s a great question and I don’t know what kind of exposure Amazon employees have to audio logs from those devices but I’m certain there’s some sure to required troubleshooting and debugging.
Stopping deliveries sure but this is a couple of steps further.
I also don’t know how integrated the various aspects of a user’s account are and whether it would even be possible for Amazon to have taken a smaller step.
Tell me you didn’t read the article without telling me you didn’t read the article.
It was only Jackson’s technical skills and particular automated home setup that saved him from what could have been a larger lockout. “My home was fine as I just used Siri or [a] locally hosted dashboard if I wanted to change a light’s color or something of that nature,” he explained.
Oh god the overdrama. Like everyones lives are dependent on Amazon, being denied service from them is the same as being erased from existence.
They lost all of their cloud data, that could be your hobbies, projects, etc. As he said in the article, he bought the products and paid for the services, they had no right to be judge and jury and turn it off.
Jackson explained on his blog on June 4. “In the end, my account was unlocked on Wednesday [May 31, six days later], with no follow-up to inform me of the resolution.”
Damn he dont have hobbies anymore
projects, photos, etc.
All his shit got deleted and he still has more than you do in your head.
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.
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.
