Amazon Locks Man Out of His Smart Home After Baseless Racism Accusation

This issue has raised questions about the risks of smart home technology.

Source: Amazon Locks Man Out of His Smart Home After Baseless Racism Accusation

However, despite clearing the air with Amazon, Jackson’s account was still locked for an entire week.

I mean… what?! The craziest part of Orwell’s dire warnings about total surveillance and control by the State is that the whole thing was subcontracted to corporations for tax benefits to avoid the Constitutional ramifications. Not only that, but “we” are lining up in droves to pay for the equipment to enable this in order to, say, save 10% on things bought through the poster child of an “enshittified” corporation.

Following the messy ordeal, Jackson said he is “seriously considering discontinuing” his Amazon Echo devices.

On what planet would someone who went through this not immediately rip out any and all Amazon-connected devices from their home? Why would anyone continue to install it with just this one story as an example of what can happen when you give a faceless corporation control over your home? Not only have the “lizard people” been revealed by this situation, this guy — and we, collectively — are saying, “Well, maybe they’re not so bad.” I literally can’t even.

The Amazon lobbyists who kill U.S. consumer privacy protections

In Virginia, the company boosted political donations tenfold over four years before persuading lawmakers this year to pass an industry-friendly privacy bill that Amazon itself drafted. In California, the company stifled proposed restrictions on the industry’s collection and sharing of consumer voice recordings gathered by tech devices. And in its home state of Washington, Amazon won so many exemptions and amendments to a bill regulating biometric data, such as voice recordings or facial scans, that the resulting 2017 law had “little, if any” impact on its practices, according to an internal Amazon document.

The architect of this under-the-radar campaign to smother privacy protections has been Jay Carney, who previously served as communications director for Joe Biden, when Biden was vice president, and as press secretary for President Barack Obama. Hired by Amazon in 2015, Carney reported to founder Jeff Bezos and built a lobbying and public-policy juggernaut that has grown from two dozen employees to about 250, according to Amazon documents and two former employees with knowledge of recent staffing.

Source: The Amazon lobbyists who kill U.S. consumer privacy protections

Basically, this is everything you need to know about the state governance in the US. Literally all of our current national social issues take a backseat to what the Fortune 500 wants. Our governments, federal and state, do nothing but the bidding of big businesses, collectively decided by who’s in power, and which corporations are currently donating the most to campaigns. There’s nothing else to debate until Citizens United is fixed. Nothing. You can argue about gerrymandering and voting rights all you want, but personal voting does not matter in the slightest. Big business will always get what they want. If you happen to get something you want in the process, then just consider it a happy accident, and be on your way.

Nota bene, I’m NOT singling out a Democratic administration on this. There are innumerable examples of this sort of insider-turned-“lobbyist” on both sides of the aisle. Comcast, AT&T, and the FCC have had three-way incestuous relationship, stretching back for decades, across many administrations.

New York State to Revolutionize Antitrust

The Amazon H2Q fight in 2019 woke up the anti-monopolists in New York. Now they are moving forward with a new stronger trust-busting law.

“Too Much Power in Too Few Hands” – An Interview with Senator Michael Gianaris:

Senator, first of all, thanks for talking to me. I’ll start with a simple question. Do we have a monopoly problem? And if so, can you frame the issue in terms that anybody could understand?

Sen. Gianaris: The best way I can put it is that there is too much power in too few hands. This concentration of power creates the opportunity for corruption, and not just corruption in the traditional sense, although it creates that opportunity as well. But it just corrupts the way the marketplace is supposed to work. It diminishes competition, and it squashes small and medium sized players, who can’t compete with not just the size of the biggest players, but the tactics that they’re using and their reach into multiple aspects of economic life.

For goodness sake, they are reaching into multiple aspects of governmental life, and they’re trying to dictate to governments how we should be making our decisions. And we saw it, of course, with Amazon’s second headquarters situation. They created a bidding war amongst local governments! And you saw it again, with Amazon trying to change the makeup of Seattle City Council because they weren’t happy with a proposal to help homeless people.

This power is changing the very nature of our democracy and our economic democracy, to have so few people making all the decisions.

Source: New York State to Revolutionize Antitrust (emphasis mine)

This is the key to the issue. As a theme, in my writing, I’ve complained that government regulatory power has been “captured” by corporations through campaign contributions. But here’s a guy who’s campaign doesn’t need the kind of money that Amazon can give him through a PAC. He’s a state senator, with a very comfortable seat. He can speak up. And he’s asking the right question: who’s in control?

People who seek office presumably have a mind to, you know, govern. And the money that Amazon throws around is routinely taking that power out of their hands. We need more people like Senator Gianaris who stop this bribery for control, and tell the people running Amazon, “No.” No, you can’t have this, if it means that we have to set aside ethical concerns. No, you can’t have this, if you intend to abandon your implied social responsibility to the people you employ or the city in which you run your business.

If we are going to avoid the currently-predictable, grim meathook cyberpunk future of a world of corporate states, this and this alone is the motivation that can put a stop to the trend: elected representatives with a long-term view who act like adults, and tell whining, spoiled toddlers no.

Amazon Faced 75,000 Arbitration Demands. Now It Says: Fine, Sue Us – WSJ

Companies have spent more than a decade forcing employees and customers to resolve disputes outside the traditional court system, using secretive arbitration proceedings that typically don’t allow plaintiffs to team up and extract big-money payments akin to a class action.

Now, Amazon. AMZN -0.06% com Inc. is bucking that trend. With no announcement, the company recently changed its terms of service to allow customers to file lawsuits. Already, it faces at least three proposed class actions, including one…

Source: Amazon Faced 75,000 Arbitration Demands. Now It Says: Fine, Sue Us – WSJ

Not even Amazon can afford to keep enough lawyers on hand to continue the arbitration game. They have become a victim of their own size. Hilarious.

Someone on HN dug into the actual court proceedings, and found an epic comment from the judge.

Twitter Decries India Intimidation, Will Press for Changes – Bloomberg

The social network reiterated its commitment to India as a vital market, but signaled its growing concern about the government’s recent actions and potential threats to freedom of expression that may result. The company also joined other international businesses and organizations in criticizing new IT rules and regulations that it said “inhibit free, open public conversation.”

Source: Twitter Decries India Intimidation, Will Press for Changes – Bloomberg

It is, perhaps, a little rich for Twitter to be complaining about inhibition of “free, open public conversation” after throwing conservatives off their platform after the last election, in fact, as part of a larger move, along with Facebook and Amazon, to simply cancel them from them from the internet entirely. You may or may not agree with the decision to do so, but you have to admit that the hypocrisy of complaining about pressure to do the same thing by a foreign government is a little too on-the-nose. The Indian government just wants some of the same social engineering and control that the political Left in America literally just demonstrated.

Either social media companies are common carriers, and free of any censorship (where affected parties can always sue for any and all illegal speech), or they are, by default, a platform in support and service of censorship, and fair game to be manipulated by anyone with the legal or financial pressure to do so on their behalf. You cannot have it both ways.

jwz: ENGAGEMENT!

Every time we post to our Facebook account, it immediately gets 2-5 one-word comments from random Indian dudes with locked accounts that are years old and have thousands of friends:

Source: jwz: ENGAGEMENT!

There’s never post about Facebook on “Hacker” “News” where the comment thread isn’t filled with people saying, “I hate it too, but what do you want me to do? Never know anything that’s going on around me? There’s literally no other option.” Even JWZ himself, who abhors Facebook, still uses the platform to promote is nightclub in San Francisco. That’s how deeply ingrained the service has become to society, and how irreplaceable it is to local businesses.

This is a pitch-perfect example of what I was talking about in my previous post. This irreplaceability is precisely what all tech investment is gunning for: total control of a channel. Eliminating all competitors in the space, and establishing a monopoly. If you want to advertise some local social event, at this point, Facebook is your de facto only choice.

Right now, Uber seems like a good idea. Door Dash seems pretty nifty. WeWork sounds great. But make no mistake, once those platforms have removed all the competition in their spaces, their services will start to experience the same sort of corruption that is being described here. Scammers will flourish, as they focus their efforts. All of these services will come to feel like shopping at Amazon, where you used to be able to trust the reviews and delivery times, and now it’s just a roll of the dice on both.

Amazon Denies Workers Pee in Bottles. Here Are the Pee Bottles.

“You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you?” Amazon tweeted. Drivers say they’re being gaslit.

Source: Amazon Denies Workers Pee in Bottles. Here Are the Pee Bottles.

This is America, where the biggest, richest companies on the planet can’t even pay workers enough to let them take proper bathroom breaks. It would be funny if it weren’t so extensively documented for years, and yet our captured government does nothing about it.

This sort of unfettered capitalism is making me a liberal. We bail out companies, time after time, while they give their executives obscene bonuses, and let people fend for themselves, to try to make a living like this. This is not the sort of thing the United States should be about.

I can’t, in good conscience, continue to support an economic system like this. We’re watching a new feudalistic society take shape, in which there is an aristocracy of business owners and executives, and a proletariat of peasants that work their “fields” for subsistence. Modern-day America has all but wiped out all the middle-class economic progress of the post-war boom. The “American dream” is dead.

People are getting angry about it. I know, because I’m one of them. I think the Republicans are going to be out of power for a long time, especially if another Trump is the best they can do.

When U.S. blamed Saudi crown prince for role in Khashoggi killing, fake Twitter accounts went to war

Saudi-based Twitter accounts using fake profile pictures, repetitive wording and spammy tactics sought to undermine the conclusion by U.S. intelligence officials, made public Friday, that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman “approved” the operation that led to the killing of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

Source: When U.S. blamed Saudi crown prince for role in Khashoggi killing, fake Twitter accounts went to war

More and more of our news cycle is centering on Twitter. The blue-check-mark journalists who enjoy relative stature on the platform get preferential treatment, and there’s hardly a news article today which doesn’t reference at least one Tweet for an official quote. Like Amazon reviews, American society is placing increasingly-serious trust in an inherently untrustworthy system, and the people who run it are doing so in opaque and unaccountable ways.

#SocialMediaIsDestroyingSociety

Fake Amazon reviews ‘being sold in bulk’ online – BBC News

A Which? investigation found 10 sites offering fake Amazon Marketplace reviews from as little as £5 each.

An Amazon spokesman said: “We remove fake reviews and take action against anyone involved in abuse.”

Source: Fake Amazon reviews ‘being sold in bulk’ online – BBC News

As I was saying, some consumer-protection outfit in our government should literally shut Amazon’s “review” system down. It’s a complete fiasco. And the mere idea that Amazon is doing anything significant to combat the problem is a slap in the face, on top of the spit in the eye. You don’t even have to read an exposé to understand this. Ten minutes of reading reviews, and you can feel it in your bones.

I still use Amazon, for name-brand purchases of things that I would tend to put off buying for a couple weeks, until the next time I went to a store. With Prime, if you’re buying something well-established, and clearly delineated, it can be a nice convenience. But for anything requiring a decision, I avoid it.

If you’re going to put any faith in any reviews on the site, you have to filter by the 1-star ratings, and read them carefully. Unfortunately, competitors are also buying negative reviews of the competition’s products, so you can’t really trust them either. Trying to sort out the truth of online reviews is much more work than simply going to a store, and selecting an option on the shelf.

As I’ve also said before, Best Buy, Target, and other big-box retailers are doing the curation for us, and it turns out there’s a lot of value in this. I hope more people wake up to this fact. They’re simply not going to carry obvious junk that loses money for them through high rates of returns. Thus you have a reasonable expectation that anything you buy at retail is going to essentially “do what it says on the tin.” This is why I’ve gone back to doing most of my physical purchases from retailers, and avoiding the whole scammy thing.

Plus, you don’t have to play the game of Chinese roulette in whether or not the thing you finally select on the site is going to come over on a slow boat from the Far East, despite your “free” “2-day” shipping.

On the one hand, I find it difficult to believe that Amazon is the most successful realization of online commerce that our modern computer technologies can produce. On the other hand, you really can’t expect any different outcome, given the profit motives of all involved.

A comment from the Slashdot thread about this article sums it all up nicely:

Yup. And Amazon does not really want to fix the issue. They could if they wanted to, but they just won’t do anything about it, even when you report blatant violations and that’s from personal experience of a fake reviewer ring ganging up on me.

A while ago I bought some of the “top selling” binoculars from Amazon.co.uk because they looked shady and as I am quite familiar with scopes and binos I did some thorough and rather technical reviews. I was a top-500 reviewer at the time and the reviews appeared near the top. The result was that the sellers messaged me to warn me they are “reporting my account as of a malicious rival”, they left comments accusing me of being the owner of “rival store Agena Astro” (that was bizarre – that’s a large and very reputable US astro retailer to which I have no affiliation), and then my reviews started getting dozens of downvotes daily (it was possible then) until my reviews disappeared from the front page. Then, I got a message from someone with screenshots from a facebook group where the seller had users whom they paid and/or gave free products to, asking to downvote all my reviews. The guy told me he was in that group to get free products, but when he saw that message and looked up my profile he just could not do it and contacted me instead. I forwarded all the screenshots to Amazon, even though it should have been obvious that a group of users mass downvoting specific reviews is not something legitimate, and Amazon thanked me and did nothing. From a top-500 reviewer I fell well below top-1000, while the “best seller” garbage binoculars stayed on with glowing clueless or fake reviews visible. My profile did not recover even after the downvote feature was removed, the mass downvotes are permanent.

I have been a Prime member for over a decade and buy most online things from Amazon (not blindly, I do look around), but I miss the days when I could rely on Amazon reviews for purchases, or when the searches either returned good products or no products, not a sea of crap you have to navigate through…

Of course, then you have to wonder if he was telling the truth.