I want to apologize in advance for the tone of this post. This issue makes me frightened, angry, frustrated and depressed. It is appropriate that I convey that, but this is not my favorite mode of expression.
Last month, Amazon blocked a Baltimore, Maryland-based Microsoft engineer named Brandon Jackson from accessing his “smart home” features. It disabled his Alexa and Echo Show, which managed his other smart devices. The justification for this intrusion was that an Amazon delivery driver thought he heard a racist remark from Jackson’s automated Eufy audio message when the driver rang the doorbell, which would have been odd indeed, since Jackson is black and he wasn’t at home at the time. The driver, good little Orwellian that he is, reported the imagined offense to Big Brother Amazon, which then exacted its revenge for Jackson’s WrongThink.
There was no racist comment. Jackson has multiple security cameras, and confirmed that fact, as did Amazon’s investigation. The Eufy doorbell had issued its programed response: “Excuse me, can I help you?” and the driver, walking away and wearing headphones, must have misinterpreted the message as “Bite me, you mocha-colored product of second-rate evolutionary processes!” or something similar. A completely understandable mistake on the driver’s part that resulted in Jackson’s Amazon account, his Alexa and Echo Show locking him out the next day. It took a week to undo it all.
Amazon confirmed the episode, and issued a statement promising that it was working to prevent similar incidents from happening in future. That’s nice. Everything is groovy, then!
Except that it’s not. The incident should start loud ethics alarms ringing, and everywhere. American blacks and other minorities have been conditioned to perceive animus where there isn’t any. Citizens are eager to exact vengeance and retribution on their neighbors and community members for imagined slights, real or imagined. People have handed over control of much of their daily life to technology over which they do not have the necessary control. Big Tech and other corporations have immense power and inadequate internal and external safeguards to prevent abuse of that power. In addition, they believe it is appropriate to use that power to censor speech, punish political positions they don’t approve of (or want to derive benefits from appearing to disapprove), and to restrict individual liberty. They are also eager to use that power to serve as agents of the government. I could go on, but that’s enough, I think, to establish why the incident was legitimate news that the public needed, and needs, to know about. It should be a wake-up call, but if an alarm clock rings in the forest with nobody to hear it…is there really an alarm?
The left side of the mainstream media, and that is at least 95% of it, didn’t report the story. The usual conservative sources did: Fox, Newsweek (when did that publication take such a hard right turn?), the New York Post, and the usual suspects. The Washington Post didn’t, but then it is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon. What do you expect? Journalism? The New York Times didn’t, which signaled to its minions among the good—as in progressive, pro-Democrat, wokey—news media that they should bury the story too.
You see, they want their Big Tech ally to be able to leverage this kind of control. They want the public to blithely hand over the power to censor, intimidate and punish to companies like Amazon and Google, and they definitely support creating a society where citizens can be not only accused of being racists, sexists, bigots, and fascists but presumed guilty of such accusations even when they did and said nothing wrong or offensive except in the view of those who believe that positions they disagree with are inherently wrongful and offensive. “We work hard to provide customers with a great experience while also ensuring drivers who deliver Amazon packages feel safe,” Amazon said in its barely apologetic statement acknowledging its treatment of Jackson.
Ah yes, those dangerous automated doorbell messages….
Do I sound like I am raising a conspiracy theory? Whenever the Left’s march to totalitarianism is noticed, the alarm is called a “right wing conspiracy theory.” All right: I want a convincing, honest explanation of how the news media’s embargo of this story can be anything but sinister. I’ll even agree to let such an explanation by the self-banned commenter here whose one-note theme for weeks was that Ethics Alarms unfairly maligns the New York Times for being untrustworthy. When I search on its site for Brandon Jackson, all that comes up is the football player by the same name and the Brandon Jackson who spent years in prison because of a “racist law.” The same with the Post, NBC, NPR, CBS, ABC, USA TODAY and the rest. Why are all of them emulating Frank Drebin…
That they are is a major, important news story, one that should trigger more ethics alarms and democracy alarms than Jackson’s experience alone.
They won’t cover the media story either, because, as the Washington Post knows and preaches, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
ADDED: The more I think about this the more upset it makes me. Jackson wrote about his experience in a Medium post, and it seems clear that he is trying as hard as he can not to make Amazon or his bosses at Microsoft angry with him. That’s another result of the oppressive, wary, timid, compliant society under construction here.
Ethics Alarms 
The question that so many of us face is, how not to be a “good German” while the barefaced malignancy of Big Brother expands at an alarming rate.
One answer; become active within your own neighborhood/community. *Make your stand locally* where you know the landscape and the players involved. We actively resist fascism one community at a time because fascism takes root one community at a time. This is what I do and it works.
Hear, hear!
I do not like the overuse of your Signature Significance tag, but this deserves it: no trustworthy company would ever abuse its power this way (and pretend it was an accident).
What is worse (and maybe scarier) is a response from Jackson: “It seems more sensible to impose a temporary delivery restriction or purchasing ban on my account.”
No, it doesn’t. Not at all. Not one bit. We are not supplicants of Amazon. Would it be any more sensible to make you do an act of contrition, say 10 Hail Marys and wear a hair shirt for 24 hours?
Absolutely not!
-Jut
A few years ago I stopped shopping on Amazon unless absolutely unavoidable. I shop on eBay instead and just use Amazon to read their reviews of products I purchase cheaper on eBay. Plus, most of the eBay vendors offer free shipping without any membership requirement. I am not a Jeff Bezos fanboy.
That’s funny: I deliberately didn’t use the tag this time because I felt I had been over-using it!
See, I just can’t win….
I think the problem I have with it is that there are a lot of behaviors labeled as Signature Significance that I can see people doing just out of frustration, or panic. In that regard, I think of my state’s rules on disbarment (which are probably the same in other jurisdictions): misappropriating any client funds from a trust account, even once, regardless of the amount, is enough to warrant disbarment. That is Signature Significance: if you steal client money, even $5.00, you have demonstrated that you are not worthy of the public trust and should not be a lawyer. It is behavior for which there is no legitimate excuse. Many instances of Signature Significance I see on here are sorts of behavior for which there is no good excuse, but some passable excuses (I am not talking about the feces smearing/throwing instances; claiming to be a primates just does not cut it).
There is NO explanation for shutting down a house. They can’t really say they did it accidentally without kind of revealing that they had certain protocols by which they would decide to shut someone’s house off.
It could only happen by accident if it was made easy to do. And, why would they make it so easy to do if they didn’t intend to use that power. But that leads to the question why they thought it would be a good idea to set up the ability to shut down a single user’s entire account.
Now would be a good time for some lawyer to scour the Terms of Service for Amazon and either publicize the Terms that would allow such a thing or, if they don’t exist, sue the hell out of them for breaching the Terms of Service.
-Jut
“All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they rely exclusively on force.”
George Orwell
Yes, I saw this story a week or so ago and was hoping you would pick it up. The thing that amazed me was the comments; all but a few (1 or 2) were concerned with whether there was a racist remark or not. To me, it doesn’t matter if there was a racist remark. Amazon or their employees have no right to issue judgement and especially punishment. Isn’t that taking law into their own hands? Only one or two commenters to the article even touched on this point. That’s the first thing that came to my mind – who the hell do they think they are.
And this example is one of the main reasons I have no Alexa, Siri, Cortana, wi-fi controlled garage door opener or any other device in my house that connects to wi-fi other than our pcs. Everything else is or would be blocked with access filtering if the only option was to buy it with wi-fi. I’m a retired software engineer and I do not trust any of these big tech companies. I have all microphones and video disabled on our PCs and have gone as far as to uninstall the drivers. I’m sorry, I just don’t trust them. Anyway, this paragraph is kind of an off topic rant. Sorry.
There was an also incident some time back where people have “smart-home” controlled thermostats and during a heat wave they couldn’t set their thermostats lower than 74 – looked it up – “Colorado utility company locks 22,000 thermostats in 90 degree weather due to ‘energy emergency'”. The thermostats were locked at 78. The only justification here is that the consumers signed up for this plan to get a reduced rate. I don’t care what kind of reduced rate I could get – I’m not giving up control of my home heating and cooling or anything else.
There’s a formerly NYC-based computer repairman named Louis Rossman who occasionally posts commentary on the industry and lobbies on pro-consumer positions like Right to Repair. He posted a video about this incident, and days later Amazon put some sanctions on the kickbacks that they provide to people who link to products on Amazon. Services he’s been using for years without incident.
Why do these companies even have the ability to shut off people’s devices? Why was that ability programmed into things to begin with?The Internet of Things has always struck me as sinister. Why does Amazon need internet access to my vacuum cleaner or Google need access to my thermostat? Why have people so trustingly agreed to give monopolies intimate details and control of their lives?
This incident is foreshadowing of what is to come if CBDCs are allowed to replace cash as currency. It will be the ability to pay your mortgage or buy groceries that will be cut off when someone suspects you of saying or thinking something naughty. Much like Amazon, no one will need proof or evidence to mess up your daily life.
I read somewhere the other day that you can get shadow banned on social media simply by reading articles that don’t come from mainstream news sources. Facebook and Google and Twitter can just look at the tracking cookies on your browser and ban you from being heard for looking at what they consider unapproved materials. You don’t even have to say anything wrong, wrong think can just be extracted from your choice of reading materials. I don’t know if that is true, but I do know it is possible it is true. It’s a terrifying idea. Mainstream sources don’t report on what they don’t want people to think about. If you can be punished for looking at other news sources, what happens to your ability to think about things the ruling class doesn’t want you thinking about?
I am surprised this sort of thing never resulted in retaliatiory violence.
I don’t know why this is surprising or frightening. The banks have been doing this for years to people. You think it is scary that you can’t control your air conditioning? What about if no bank will let you charge credit cards at your company because they don’t like your politics? What if all banks close your accounts because you say something to the press that they disagree with? What would you do if you were reduced to cash because the government doesn’t deem banking a vital service and allows the companies to discriminate based on political grounds? How are you going to survive if you have to use cash for everything? What happens when they push a digital currency and you can’t even use cash anymore?
The government agencies already have you on a list and there is really only one government agency. If you don’t believe me, the IRS has been sending armed agents to seize the Form 4473’s from gun stores to build a gun-owner database. Why is the IRS doing it? Because the ATF is forbidden to do that by law, but the IRS isn’t. You can say you could sue about it, but once they have the data, they have the data. It can’t be undone unless you eliminate the entire bureaucracy as unconstitutional.
What did banks do about civil rights protestors at the height of the Civil Rights movement?