[HarryHirsch]

Ring doorbells, because the microphone heard the citizen say the N-word and locked him out of the Amazon account.

Back then, we thought legal questions about discrimination silly - if the baker won't bake cakes for lesbians, who cares, there are dozens of bakers in town who are not silly, why fight with the one who is, especially since the only recourse you will get is a birthday cake.

But now with the app monopolies it's different. If Lyft bans you over a justified chargeback and Uber bans you over another justified chargeback you are going to have a problem.

[nickthegreek]

Not what happened. The driver thought they heard the nword come from a Eufy doorbell. Which was them mishearing the automated response. No person uttered an nword and no ring doorbell was involved.

Amazon did lock the guys account for the report from their driver. That did lock him out of his other IoT devices.

[HarryHirsch]

The thing is - even racists have a right that their devices work. They paid money for it. Amazon's duty is to protect their driver, and if they refuse to deliver because a driver has been threatened that's OK. But they can't lock him out of their alarm system or automated door opener. It's worse because when you choose a camera doorbell because you have a choice between Ring and Nest, which is not much of a choice.

[nickthegreek]

Sure, but your original post made this man to be out as a racist. He isn’t.

There are other doorbell choices, like Eufy by Anker. The one this man used.

[nani8ot]

Eufy by Anker lied about their products storing data locally and instead uploaded it to their servers — and had them unsecured so anyone could download anyones videos.

[HarryHirsch]

The point is that Amazon has no business locking even racists out of their Amazon account.

[undersuit]

Why doesn't freedom of association extend to Amazon? I'm pretty sure they argue they have the right in the EULAs the racist accepted.

[dotnet00]

There need to be reasonable limits as companies are not actually literal people, and their rights should be inferior to those of literal people. Treating companies as people and anything they do (eg in the lens of speech) has caused so much damage and has obviously just been an excuse for lawmakers to not have to make tough decisions.

An example that comes to mind is how if you get banned from Steam, you typically still retain the ability to access your past purchases, you just lose multiplayer, purchasing new content etc.

Similarly, companies should not be able to unilaterally discard the responsibilities they take on when they sell people things that require continuous service to operate.

This should be especially relevant in cases like with Philips Hue, now that they've chosen to bear the burden of even previous Hue owners' smart homes, they should not be able to willy nilly shed that in a way that renders the system non-functional. Any bans they make should just leave the hardware usable in the way that it already was.