I work in IT and I keep a baseball bat handy in case I suspect a device has gone online.

However what a ridiculous situation on Amazon's part and it raises a bigger question. Even if this guy was 100% a racist shitbag, should he have had his Amazon account suspended unilaterally in the first place? Should someone have their bank account closed too then? How about utilities? I obviously am not agreeing with someone being racist but think that allowing corporations to impulsively take punitive actions is a slippery slope. Next thing we know, Amazon will be offering capital punishment as a service.

I'm of the opinion the "smart" home thing was just unintentional secondary, I can't imagine them being smart enough to do so on purpose.

Selfhosting is the way to go. All my automations are controlled by a HomeAssistant instance running locally.

Remember what "Cloud" means: Putting your data on some elses computer. No thanks.

Reason 89327458934795 I will never have any smart home shit in my house that I can't host myself.

"The cloud is just somone else's computer"

Am I the only one who can be bothered to get up off my ass to flip a fucking light switch?

a bit off-topic but relevant nonetheless:

i know i'm probably in the minority opinion here, but there are better privacy-respecting (and google spiting) platforms for viewing these videos than the official youtube website and rossman has been vocal in his support for these; particularly Odysee. below are 3 different projects, Odysee which is a whole separate and sustainable project, and piped & invidious which are privacy-respecting frontends to youtube. i think in future it'd be valuable to link these alternatives instead of the official youtube link.

https://odysee.com/@rossmanngroup:a/amazon-accuses-customer-of-racism-shuts:2 -- Odysee

https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=NfiIXooD77s -- Piped

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=NfiIXooD77s -- Invidious

This is one of the many reasons why you don't buy devices that require cloud services to function.

I’m on the bandwagon of no “smart home” devices that connect to the cloud. I build a lot my own little controllers with the ESP8266/ESP32 using MQTT to communicate with OpenHAB.

OpenHAB has served me well, but I started using it so long ago that I have not tried out some of the newer options like HomeAssistant.

Here is one of the devices I developed. https://www.instructables.com/Introducing-Climaduino-The-Arduino-Based-Thermosta/

The code referenced in the Instructable is much older code. I don’t think I have my current and much simpler code on Github. If there is any interest, I can push it.

Even if the accusation had been true, Amazon shouldn’t have this ability.

I work in IT, and I don’t have any ‘smart’ things at home. I don’t want to come home and troubleshoot more dumb junk.

I don’t even have a smart watch. My watch tells the time, has a timer, etc and that’s all I need.

No better reason to ditch the internet of things.

It's mind boggling that the victim writing all of this is still delusional about Amazon making a change based on this incident. From listening to what Louise read it doesn't even seem like the victim is fully set on removing echo/Amazon, just "strongly considering it". At this point they deserve every bit of headache and misfortune that comes from continuing to deal with Amazon.

Are there any voice assistant solutions that run locally? Don't really care about conversational stuff. Just the basic 'lights on' type commands.

I try to have the best of both worlds - my home is primarily run on a Zigbee network from a Raspberry Pi with a Conbee, which is then linked up to Homebridge which talks to HomeKit (being in the Apple ecosystem).

This means I get the creature comforts of a consumer home cloud service like Apple Home, but I get to call all the shots - controls are all local, and if I wanted to get my home off the cloud, I can without any reprocussions.

It’s surprisingly very reliable as well - I haven’t had a single minor hiccup for more than 12 months, and even then, the last one just required a reboot of the Pi.

Worked at Amazon = moved entire family off the public cloud. Everything is self hosted and still “easy”. I backup one of my backups to an s3 provider and call it good.

This is dystopian. Amazon should be crushed and split into hundreds smaller companies.