Just before Memorial Day, Amazon customer and Microsoft engineer Brandon Jackson found himself unable to interact with his smart home through his Amazon Alexa after an Amazon delivery driver thought he heard Jackson’s doorbell make a racist remark.

In a post on Medium, which has since been updated to clarify details Jackson felt were reported inaccurately by the press, Jackson wrote he disputed the delivery driver’s claim on the grounds that he himself is the same race as many Amazon drivers in his area and that it was unlikely anyone was home when his doorbell allegedly made the remark. Furthermore, Jackson has noted, he has security footage of the delivery driver wearing headphones at the time, which may have caused him to mishear the doorbell’s automated greeting of “Excuse me, can I help you?”

According to Jackson, his Amazon Echo was his primary means of interacting with the smart devices, and upon finding he was locked out of his Amazon account, he thought someone may have tried to access it illicitly. But after speaking to two different representatives from Amazon, Jackson stated, he learned of the allegations against his doorbell.

In a statement to Newsweek, an Amazon spokesperson indicated the actions it took against Jackson while the company was investigating the accusation against his doorbell were a matter of ensuring the safety of Amazon’s drivers.

Following Amazon’s investigation, Jackson was allowed back into his Amazon account and is once more permitted to interact with his smart home through Alexa.

However, Jackson has questioned why someone’s entire smart home system should be rendered unusable due to a single accusation by a delivery driver.

“It seems more sensible to impose a temporary delivery restriction or purchasing ban,” he wrote.

Since reports of the incident initially circulated, Jackson has emphasized that he had systems in place that allowed him to continue to interact with his smart home. Indicating his situation was not as dire as some have reported, he also noted the average smart home user may not have the ability, time, or desire to host all their devices locally or “spend their weekend SSH-ed into a terminal and doing planned outages for fall back validation.”

By coming forward with his experience, Jackson has stated, he hopes to highlight how overreliant we are on a few tech giants and that simply purchasing a connected device does not mean you own the device or the data it generates, or even have a guaranteed right to use the device — at least not without ongoing corporate permission that can be taken away.

Subsequently, incidents such as this should raise questions of what this permission is predicated on and under what circumstances it might be revoked.

Jackson’s case would suggest a spurious accusation of racism against a doorbell by a distracted delivery driver is sufficient for a company to disrupt your life seriously.

Looking forward, one wonders whether this will be looked back on as an isolated incident or a harbinger of a future norm whereby customers will regularly be locked out of any number of smart devices for reasons ranging from trivial misunderstandings to heated disputes with customer service reps.

Perhaps one day, being locked out of your smart devices will just become part of the normal cancellation process if social media mobs can convince corporations they shouldn’t be doing business with you.

Maybe one day, you’ll find your electric car won’t start because Alexa disapproves of your thoughts on Bud Lite .

Perhaps it's time we ask ourselves how many of the day-to-day items we use really need to be smart and start creating a demand to retain dumb alternatives.

Daniel Nuccio is a Ph.D. student in biology and a regular contributor to the College Fix and the Brownstone Institute.