Amazon is facing serious questions about both user privacy and how it deals with customers accused of wrongdoing after a user found their account cancelled in the face of a bogus racism complaint from a delivery driver.
Brandon Jackson, an engineer at Microsoft, wrote a post on Medium explaining that his Amazon account was briefly suspended last month after a delivery driver reported him for racial abuse heard via his smart doorbell in Baltimore, Maryland.
This caused serious issues for the control of his smart home devices, as his Alexa-powered Amazon Echos instantly stopped working without an active account attached.
Jackson subsequently discovered that nobody was home at the time the incident occured, and that the driver in question was wearing headphones in the footage captured by his device.
“I reviewed the footage and confirmed that no such comments had been made,” he wrote. “Instead, the Eufy doorbell had issued an automated response: ‘Excuse me, can I help you?’
“The driver, who was walking away and wearing headphones, must have misinterpreted the message. Nevertheless, by the following day, my Amazon account was locked, and all my Echo devices were logged out.”
Jackson writes that he only discovered the reasons for his account suspension when he dialled a number in a support email alerting him to the news.
“When I connected with the executive, they asked if I knew why my account had been locked,” he wrote. “When I answered I was unsure, their tone turned somewhat accusatory. I was told that the driver who had delivered my package reported receiving racist remarks from my ‘Ring doorbell’ (it’s actually a Eufy, but I’ll let it slide).”
Fortunately, in Jackson’s case, he was able to prove his innocence via “multiple cameras recording everything that happens on my property”. It still took Amazon six days to reinstate his account, and there was no confirmation or apology when it happened.
Serious questions
The whole report raises some unanswered questions. Firstly, as mentioned by Jackson above, the smart doorbell isn’t made by Amazon, but by the Chinese company Eufy. In other words, this doesn’t appear to be a case of another possible Ring privacy breach, but that Amazon simply took the delivery driver’s complaint as objective truth and acted accordingly.
Secondly, as Jackson was only able to reinstate his account with video proof provided by his cameras, how would Amazon treat a customer without such evidence? What right of appeal would a wrongfully accused customer have?
We reached out to Amazon on both points, but received a statement that addresses neither.
“We work hard to provide customers with a great experience while also ensuring drivers who deliver Amazon packages feel safe,” Amazon spokesperson Simone Griffin told The Standard.
“In this case, we learned through our investigation that the customer did not act inappropriately, and we’re working directly with the customer to resolve their concerns while also looking at ways to prevent a similar situation from happening again.”
For Jackson, this experience has made him rethink his “relationship with Amazon”. While he believes the driver made an honest mistake, he says that the company’s response was overkill when a simple delivery restriction would have been more measured.
“After nearly a decade of loyalty, I’ve been given a harsh reminder that a misunderstanding can lead to such drastic measures,” he wrote. “It seems more reasonable to handle such issues in a more compartmentalised way, rather than a blanket shutdown of all services.”
