Oh boy, don't you just love smart homes? They're probably one of the smartest things that Big Tech has implemented so far in terms of controlling their cattle. AKA, the people that buy into these smart gadgets that they have no actual control over. Let me get a smart watch and a smartphone and a smart oven in my smart home because I'm a dumbass. Now, don't get me wrong. Smart devices can have their benefits. They can provide you with all sorts of conveniences and this is the reason why they're so attractive. You know, it's really convenient to do something like pre-heat your oven when you're sitting at a stoplight, 30 minutes from home and you're really hungry for dinner after a long day of work. So you want to shorten the amount of time. It's going to take you to be able to get your food made or if you're outside working on a hot day, it's convenient to be able to open up an app on your phone and then crank up the AC so that you can come inside and cool off. You know, when you think about it, a smart home is kind of like having a stay-at-home spouse. They were the OG smart home if you think about it and typically they did a much better job at the smart home functions than Alexa or any of these other modern smart appliances. Like sure, Alexa might be able to pre-heat your oven but she's not going to be able to take the chicken tenders out of the fridge and then bread them and season them and then put them on a cookie sheet and bake them and then have the tenders plated with a side of honey mustard and have it sitting at the table ready for you as you walk in the door. But you see modern big tech smart homes, they all have a fatal flaw and funny enough, it's the same fatal flaw that some of those malfunctioning wife units have which is no loyalty. You can't trust the damn things because big tech smart homes like Alexa and Google are absolutely proprietary. You can't trust them to do what they say they will do and worst of all, you can't know for sure when they are listening to you and who they're reporting those things to are they sending recordings of you back to Amazon or Google servers. Now this story is just one of the examples of what can happen when your smart home has no loyalty to you and it actually goes against you. It might lock you out of it for an entire week for being racist. Yeah, so you better watch out. Don't watch the boondocks around Alexa. She'll swatch you after hearing two minutes of Uncle Ruckus. So this is a story about a guy named Brandon Jackson who works as an engineer at Microsoft and he has a smart home which in this case means a bunch of smart devices and appliances that are networked together through Amazon Echo devices so that he can just say Alexa, turn on the lights and the lights will come on. Now Alexa really does not like racism, okay? If you do a heck in racism in the presence of Alexa, you're gonna get a down vote from her. So the lockout that this guy got, it wasn't the doors of his house, okay? It wasn't like he got physically locked out of his house but rather all of the devices that were connected to his Alexa, everything that he would normally just go, hey Alexa, do this, he was all of a sudden locked out of them because he lost the ability to use Alexa. She would just give him the silent treatment every time we tried to talk to her. Now Brandon Jackson has a blog post on medium and he also made a YouTube video describing the incident. So I recommend you go and check those out to get the full details of what happened but here's just a quick summary from me. Brandon noticed that he was locked out of his smart devices not all of them and the reason that he wasn't locked out of all of them is that some of his smart appliances were actually self-hosted. Now personally, I don't see anything wrong with self-hosted smart devices. The smart home and the wife are not either or things. In fact, Brandon actually has a whole family and a partially self-hosted smart home. So his setup actually sounds pretty base to me except for the part that Amazon ultimately had control over. So when Alexa stopped working, he started checking through his emails to see if he got some sort of notification that his Amazon account had gotten hacked or he was locked out for some reason. He checked through his two-factor app, so on and so forth. But all he found after talking to Amazon customer service on the phone was an email from an executive at Amazon telling him to give them a call. Okay, that's pretty weird. So he goes ahead and he calls up this executive and they started accusing Brandon of being racist towards an Amazon delivery person that had been at his house a couple of days prior. And so that's why he was locked out of his Amazon account and locked out of his Alexa. How dare you do a racism in the presence of an Amazon delivery driver as an Amazon customer? Okay, you're not allowed to do that as an Amazon customer, it's in our terms and conditions. But the thing is, there was no racism. And I don't just mean that there was no racism in my opinion, okay, there was no way that anybody could misconstrue what actually happened as racist. For one, Brandon is the same race as most of the delivery drivers in his neighborhood, okay, that's one point that he made to the executives. And second of all, Brandon and his family were not even home when this alleged racist incident occurred. So what the delivery driver heard was an automated response from Brandon's Ufidorbell, which is similar to the Ring Doorbell, but it's one that you can self-host. And the video is supposedly only stored locally with this doorbell system. Although after looking into the Ufidorbell a bit, I saw some videos in post that were alleging that those local videos and screenshots were being shared with their cloud as well as this petition to Ufid security to open source their APIs and app. So yeah, this is again, why I don't recommend, or why I recommend avoiding closed source solutions and centralized solutions and instead going for open source and self-hosted. But anyway, when the delivery driver came to Brandon's empty house at 6.05 pm, he approached it and his Ufidorbell said, excuse me, can I help you? Oh no, such a horrible racist remark. We need to lock this man up. Now of course, Brandon, being the security conscious techie guy that he is, has security cameras outside of his property that record audio and video, which captured this whole incident. And he sent this to Amazon immediately, but nevertheless, it took them an entire week to restore his access to Alexa and the things connected to it. And Brandon points out in his medium article that the only reason his whole smart home system didn't go down is because he self-hosted a lot of his services. But for the average normie who tries to, I guess, smarten up their home, what they're really going to end up doing is giving Amazon, Google, or whatever company voluntary control over their home. And because some people are gullible enough to fall for the idea that these companies are protecting minorities, the big tech companies are happily going to make an example of you if you do a racism or sexism or any of the isms that isn't allowed. And in this case, there wasn't even any racism to begin with. The whole thing was made up from the beginning. Be very, very careful with adding any kind of smart appliance or smart home system to your home. OK, this guy works at Microsoft and sounds pretty privacy conscious. Yet he still ended up in a bit of a bad situation here because Amazon had this control over his home through Alexa. His smart home was not fully self-hosted for some reason. Maybe there wasn't an open source or self-hosted option for everything that he was using Alexa for. But again, that convenience that you might get from Alexa, it only exists until it doesn't exist. It's not worth it to let Amazon or any other big tech company become big brother in your home.