{"id":96201,"date":"2023-09-21T15:56:42","date_gmt":"2023-09-21T20:56:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=96201"},"modified":"2023-09-21T17:38:27","modified_gmt":"2023-09-21T22:38:27","slug":"96201","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=96201","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Never, ever<\/em><\/strong> place any<\/em> trust in “The Internet of Things” “IOT”<\/p>\n

BLUF
\nIf we ponder that relationship for a moment, we might conclude that many of the things that we believe we<\/em> control are really on loan as a means of controlling us.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Man Amazon Erased<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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On Thursday, May 25, Brandon Jackson, a software engineer in Baltimore County, Maryland, discovered that he was locked out of his Amazon account. Jackson couldn\u2019t get packages delivered to his home by the retail giant. He couldn\u2019t access any files and data he had stored with Amazon Web Services, the company\u2019s powerful cloud computing wing. It also meant that Jackson, a self-described home automation enthusiast, could no longer use Alexa for his smart home devices. He could turn on his lights manually, but only in the knowledge that Amazon could still operate them remotely.<\/p>\n

Jackson soon discovered that Amazon suspended his account because a Black delivery driver who\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

The accusations baffled Jackson. He and his family are Black. When he reviewed the doorbell\u2019s 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\u2019s automated response: \u201cExcuse me, can I help you?\u201d<\/p>\n

Submitting the surveillance video \u201cappeared to have little impact on [Amazon\u2019s] decision to disable my account,\u201d Jackson explained on his blog<\/a>\u00a0on June 4. \u201cIn the end, my account was unlocked on Wednesday [May 31, six days later], with no follow-up to inform me of the resolution.\u201d By now, many months later, Amazon\u2019s investigation into the matter appears to have concluded though the issue remains far from resolved. Contacted for a response, the company wrote: \u201cIn this case, we learned through our investigation that the customer did not act inappropriately, and we\u2019re working directly with the customer to resolve their concerns while also looking at ways to prevent a similar situation from happening again.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was only Jackson\u2019s technical skills and particular automated home setup that saved him from what could have been a larger lockout. \u201c\u200b\u200bMy home was fine as I just used Siri or [a] locally hosted dashboard if I wanted to change a light\u2019s color or something of that nature,\u201d he explained. His week of digital exile amounted to a frustrating inconvenience only because, as a tech-savvy user and professional software engineer, he had the ability to set up his own locally hosted network that acted as a failsafe. But Jackson\u2019s experience is a warning to the vast majority of Alexa users and smart home dwellers who, lacking his particular skills and foresight, are increasingly at the mercy of the tech they have embedded into their lives and bedrooms.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI came forward,\u201d Jackson told Tablet, \u201cbecause I don\u2019t think it\u2019s right that Amazon could say, \u2018I know you bought all these devices, but we think you are racist. So we\u2019re going to take [you] offline.\u2019\u201d On one side, critics lambasted Jackson as a dupe for having smart devices in the first place; others said his criticisms of Amazon implied that he didn\u2019t support a company protecting its employees. \u201cPeople missed the main point,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t really care who you are, what you do, or what you believe in. If you bought something, you should own it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jackson\u2019s story of being temporarily canceled by the tech behemoth spread across the internet after it was discussed in a YouTube video by Louis Rossman<\/a>, a\u00a0right-to-repair<\/a>\u00a0activist, independent technician, and popular YouTube personality. Right to repair, or fair repair, is a consumer-focused movement advocating for the public to be able to repair the equipment they own instead of being forced to use the manufacturer\u2019s repair services or upgrade products that have been arbitrarily made obsolete. In the early 20th century, fair-repair advocacy began with automobiles and heavy machinery, but its tenets have spread as computer chips have come to undergird contemporary life.<\/p>\n

Following Rossman\u2019s initial video about Jackons\u2019s case, Amazon alleged that Rossman had abused its affilate marketing program and placed restrictions on the YouTuber\u2019s business account, leading him to speculate in a follow-up video<\/a>\u00a0that the corporate giant was retaliating against him for covering Jackson\u2019s travails. Rossman alleges that this was the first time Amazon made any allegation against him of abusing its affiliate marketing program since he enrolled in the marketing program\u00a07.5 years ago.<\/p>\n

Jackson\u2019s experience is a warning to Alexa users and smart home dwellers who are increasingly at the mercy of the tech they have embedded into their lives and bedrooms.<\/p>\n

The number of households adopting smart home devices in the United States is expected to reach 93 million<\/a>\u00a0by 2027 and most consumers rely on cloud services for their daily online use. But the cloud is not just a metaphor to explain a connected network; it describes the complete reorganization of digital life under the power of remote centralized databases. Light switches, lightbulbs, locks, thermostats, coffee makers, air conditioners, speakers, exercise equipment, and virtually every other piece of equipment you can find in the average home can now all be operated as interconnected pieces of a single digital network, run by an outside host, such as Amazon, which operates the massive server banks that make up \u201cthe cloud.\u201d For consumers, this arrangement offers convenience and optimization. You can turn on the heat in your house from another state, or reorder a household good with a simple voice command. But the cost of that convenience is that consumers no longer independently control how their tech\u2014or their homes, since the two are increasingly integrated\u2014is operated. As Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit and another right-to-repair activist put it, \u201cWho really owns our things? It used to be us.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Brandon<\/p>\n

Brandon Jackson<\/p>\n

Alexa\u2019s\u00a0terms of use<\/a>\u00a0includes a clause stating that Amazon is permitted to terminate \u201caccess\u201d to Alexa at the company\u2019s discretion without notice. Jackson was told by a customer relations executive over the phone that he needed to assure the company that he would not ridicule or put future delivery drivers in harm\u2019s way. Nearly a month later, Amazon admitted no wrongdoing, only apologizing for \u201cinconveniences.\u201d Given absolute power over its users, there is no pressure on Amazon to explain its decision. Indeed, the company\u00a0used the same statement Tabletreceived for an earlier June\u00a0Newsweek\u00a0<\/em>article regarding Jackson\u2019s lockout.<\/p>\n

Amazon\u2019s claims of being concerned about the safety of blue-collar workers strain credibility. According to a 2021 article<\/a>\u00a0published in Vice, when minority delivery drivers faced violent threats and racial harassment, the company\u2019s penchant for efficiency took priority over worker safety. Unsustainable demands from delivery drivers have translated to drivers peeing in bottles and defecating in garbage bags, a problem Amazon\u00a0internally<\/a>\u00a0acknowledged even as it publicly denies the allegations. Inside its \u201cfulfillment centers\u201d\u2014the term the company uses for its warehouses\u2014workers\u00a0suffer<\/a>\u00a05.9 serious injuries for every 100 workers, an 80% greater injury rate than competitors. Indeed employee turnover is so high in these facilities that a leaked company\u00a0memo<\/a>\u00a0from 2022 warned that the company was on track to deplete its number of available workers by 2024.<\/p>\n

Amazon\u2019s intrusion into Jackson\u2019s life, then, should not be understood within the context of protecting workers\u2014which might begin by giving them adequate time to use the restroom\u2014but rather as part of an emergent regime of technological control. The culmination of years of debate about political and civic norm moderation on social media and in public discourse has created a new normative standard in which \u201cinnocent until proven guilty\u201d is now viewed as an oppressive and antiquated relic. As the new unelected masters of public discourse, tech giants like Amazon, Google, Twitter, and Facebook, have been encouraged to execute summary punishments of users for mere accusations of racism or \u201cdisinformation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amazon\u2019s enormous power in the global economy and ubiquitous presence in the U.S. supply chain and cloud computing sectors allows the company to take the power of surveillance and cancellation even further. Unlike purely social media companies like X (formerly known as Twitter), Amazon\u2019s suite of smart home gadgets and services gives it a direct physical presence inside of people\u2019s homes. That means that when Amazon wades into cultural issues, or decides to punish people based on offensive speech, its political values are mapped onto objects and processes used in the real world.<\/p>\n

In Jackson\u2019s case, in order to regain access to things he had already paid for, he was forced to submit the surveillance video from his home to Amazon to prove his innocence. Somehow, in the new cloud-based networked world these corporations are building for us, the solution to every problem always involves individuals handing over more of their private data.<\/p>\n

Debates over censorship, free speech and its limits typically revolve around social media use. But Hayley Tsukayama, a senior legislative activist for Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, suggested to Tablet that Jackson\u2019s case shared a similar architecture to conversations around content moderation. Companies can choose not to allow certain forms of speech, but in doing so they can no longer be treated as neutral platforms. Tsukayama argues that social media users are offered a recourse, even if the process is stacked against them. \u201cIf [Amazon] is going to look at customer behavior as being part of the terms of service,\u201d she said, \u201cthey [should] make that clear and set up a process that\u2019s perhaps not unlike what we see at Facebook, YouTube or others who deal with content takedown.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, of course, we now know that millions of social media users had their accounts censored or banned without explanation or recourse for posts, including many that were classified as \u201cdisinformation\u201d at the time of the alleged offense but contained statements that authorities later acknowledged as true. In that light, placing more trust in a content moderation model seems like a dangerous gamble. It could also lead to even more surveillance online as companies like Amazon claim a need to monitor their customers\u2019 every move so they can judge them \u201cfairly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like many digital technologies, the smart home offers connectivity at a steep price\u2014it makes individuals passive subjects of the products that surround them, including the things they own. Few of us have any real understanding of the \u201cterms of service\u201d on the devices and services that we rely on. Consider how streaming services replaced physical media and how the arrival of smartphones, with all their wonders, also meant that the owners of such phones became incapable of replacing their own batteries, SIM cards, and physical storage. If we ponder that relationship for a moment, we might conclude that many of the things that we believe we control are really on loan as a means of controlling us.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Never, ever place any trust in “The Internet of Things” “IOT” BLUF If we ponder that relationship for a moment, we might conclude that many of the things that we believe we control are really on loan as a means of controlling us. The Man Amazon Erased. On Thursday, May 25, Brandon Jackson, a software … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,74,87,80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crap-for-brains","category-scratch-a-lib-find-a-tyrant","category-technology","category-you-cant-make-this-up"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=96201"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96203,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96201\/revisions\/96203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=96201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=96201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=96201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}