“Excuse me, can I help you?”

Brandon Jackson’s Ring doorbell asked that polite question when an Amazon driver rang his doorbell.

If you don’t have a Ring doorbell, you may not know that it can be programmed to give automatic responses. It can also take messages if you like. Brandon’s was programmed to ask “Excuse me, can I help you?”

Those five words put Mr. Jackson on a journey of discovery, in which he learned that the behemoth that runs much of the backbone of the internet, powers our smart homes, and delivers many of the products we use to our homes also has the power to cancel us without warning or explanation.

The Man Amazon Erased: Where do you go when your Smart Home decides you’re not welcome https://t.co/lGYly83RO5

— Tablet Magazine (@tabletmag) September 21, 2023

I don’t know about you, but Amazon plays a big role in my life. It is so damn convenient to use, reducing much of the daily friction in our lives. I have a Ring alarm system, 10 Ring cameras around my house for security, 6 or 7 Alexa devices, and according to my history, I have made 189 orders since January 1. About half the lights in my house are Alexa-controlled.

Brandon Jackson is a software engineer and smart home enthusiast, so Amazon likely played an even larger role in his life. Until that fateful day when his Ring doorbell asked the Amazon delivery driver the racist question “Excuse me, can I help you?”

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’t get packages delivered to his home by the retail giant. He couldn’t access any files and data he had stored with Amazon Web Services, the company’s 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.

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?”

Five words and his life was turned upside-down.

For those of you who don’t know, by the way, Amazon Web Services provides the backbone of many of the services you get on the internet. AWS is everywhere, including the International Space Station, running much of the IT at the Pentagon, and a lot of banking services. If it disappeared tomorrow so would a great deal of the modern world. Guess what: if Amazon thinks you offended one of its drivers, you can lose access to some of those services, including data you trusted to Amazon.

Nice.

Submitting the surveillance video “appeared to have little impact on [Amazon’s] decision to disable my account,” 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.” By now, many months later, Amazon’s investigation into the matter appears to have concluded though the issue remains far from resolved. Contacted for a response, the company wrote: “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.”

As a software engineer, Mr. Jackson knew how to get around some of the restrictions Amazon had placed on him–he created a home server and switched to Siri to control his home devices. I am pretty sure that few people who have integrated Alexa into their lives could do the same, at least easily. And easy is what Amazon sold to you.

Ease is their product–those devices you think you own? Their functionality is actually controlled by Amazon, and they can take it away on a whim. It is in the Terms of Service, actually. Offend the company and your product just might stop working. Or perhaps they could restrict access to something else they control.

For instance, Amazon didn’t want Jackson’s story to get out, so when he discussed it on a podcast the company suddenly demonetized the podcaster.

Jackson’s 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 right-to-repair activist, 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’s 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.

Following Rossman’s initial video about Jackons’s case, Amazon alleged that Rossman had abused its affilate marketing program and placed restrictions on the YouTuber’s business account, leading him to speculate in a follow-up video that the corporate giant was retaliating against him for covering Jackson’s 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 7.5 years ago.

Boom!

Alexa’s terms of use includes a clause stating that Amazon is permitted to terminate “access” to Alexa at the company’s 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’s way. Nearly a month later, Amazon admitted no wrongdoing, only apologizing for “inconveniences.” Given absolute power over its users, there is no pressure on Amazon to explain its decision. Indeed, the company used the same statement Tablet received for an earlier June Newsweek article regarding Jackson’s lockout.

Think about that for a moment. Brandon Jackson did nothing wrong. Had to prove he did nothing wrong. Then he had to promise never to do anything wrong.

Only then did he get access to products he paid the company to get.

We are living in an emerging dystopia in which large corporations have invaded every corner of our lives, and have zero accountability to us, and government officials have large intelligence agencies monitoring our speech and behavior and reporting us to these corporations and directing what will happen if we displease them.

We will own nothing and be happy, right? If we are good little boys and girls we can have our toys.

Well I, for one, am not at all happy.