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Reason
Reason
Politics
Eugene Volokh

Smart Home System = Home System That Amazon Can Mess With If It Doesn't Like What You Say?

From a Medium post by Brandon Jackson, a Microsoft engineer:

Here's the customer video follow-up; he notes that, though he had his items configured so that (starting at around 4:18) "if something did fail I have fallbacks," "I wrote this from the perspective of someone who didn't do all of that; what if they bought their Alexa, they bought some smart lights, they bought a smart garage opener … and that's it—if they did lose access to their Alexa, they wouldn't be able to control their other stuff."

When I e-mailed Amazon for their story, I got a prompt response, within three hours:

Amazon statement attributable to Simone Griffin, an Amazon spokesperson: "We work hard to provide customers with a great experience while also ensuring drivers who deliver Amazon packages feel safe. 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."

So Amazon does seem to acknowledge that the blocking of the Amazon account (and thus the logging out of the Echo devices) happened—and indeed that, if the customer did "act inappropriately" and made the delivery person "feel [un]safe," their policy would indeed be do this. I asked them a follow-up:

Say someone does say something racist, sexist, anti-religious, anti-gay, anti-trans, etc. to an Amazon delivery person. Would Amazon then block the customer's access to Amazon's smart home technology?

I got no response, in the last three days. I also asked yesterday:

I appreciate the importance of protecting the safety of the drivers, but do you have guidelines about which actions, statements, or displays by customers would justify cutting off services? For instance, say a customer is displaying a Confederate flag on his home, or has political statements that disapprove of gay rights or trans rights, or sharply criticize particular religious groups; would that suffice, or is your policy limited to slurs said specifically to the driver?

(By way of comparison, note that, according to news accounts, some tech companies, such as Airbnb, terminate user accounts just because they believe they 'are members of or are actively affiliated with hate groups," and the term "hate groups" is of course itself quite vague and potentially broad.) I got no response.

Here's my view: I appreciate Amazon's desire to protect their drivers, including from personal insults. If, for instance, Amazon says "if you say rude things to our drivers, we'll stop delivering to you," that might be reasonable (though one would hope that the policy would be narrow and clear, and would ask the customer for his side of the story before cutting off deliveries, at least absent outright violence or threats of violence). But it's hard for me to see how this can justify cutting off access to the Amazon account as a whole.

Of course, Amazon, as a private company, isn't legally barred from cutting off such access (so long as its user agreement provides for this), under current law. But I think all of us should think many times before turning over control of our homes to companies who claim the right to cut us off at any moment.

I like technology. I like, in principle, the value that can be provided by products that are connected to the supplier, and not just stand-alone toasters, light switches, cars, etc.

But I don't like empowering companies to police my morals, politics, and speech, especially when it comes to things that help run my home. And if a company assured me—in a legally binding contract—that it would continue providing its services regardless of my supposed politics or alleged speech (again, perhaps with narrow exclusions for services that require interactions with staff, if I were to insult or threaten those staff members), that would make me much more willing to deal with it.

For some analysis on a related subject, see my new article, The Reverse Spider-Man Principle: With Great Responsibility Comes Great Power.

The post Smart Home System = Home System That Amazon Can Mess With If It Doesn't Like What You Say? appeared first on Reason.com.

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