IoT Garage Door Opener Company Disables Product After Customer’s Bad Review

While everyone lauds and glorifies the IoT smart devices, this particular incident shows that the scant and mostly paranoid fears of digital slavery might just have some grounds after all.

A Garadget customer, Robert Martin, learned this lesson first hand as his car was left stuck after he “stirred the ire” of the app creator. Robert Martin recently bought a smart, connected garage door opener, but when wasn’t satisfied with the experience he decided to give the creators a piece of his mind. He left a few bad reviews about the device, starting with an angry, 1-star review on Amazon on Saturday because of the difficulty in controlling Garadget with the iPhone app. Then he went on to Garadget’s forums, calling the product a “piece of shit.”

But instead of technical support, Martin got a really unprecedented response from Garadget in the shape of a complete ban and disabling of his product. Denis Grisak, the creator of the Garadget, messaged Martin that his harsh tone was not appreciated, and then without any prior warning, rendered the device unusable by disabling its server connection.

Naturally, Grisak received huge negative feedback which forced him to restore the access to the company servers, although he still hasn’t categorically apologised.

Grisak later talked about the incident, telling Mashable via mail that this was an

“unusually emotional call” and “a lesson that’s hard to ignore.”

Grisak says that his reaction wasn’t in response to the poor review on Amazon, but because of the post in the community board. He claims the customer was unjustified in sending bad reviews since he was still in “early stages” of the Garadget setup, and his device was “never in actual use.” Plus, Garadget is an

“add-on device which doesn’t provide or replace opener’s functionality so the customer was never locked out,” Grisak said.

He showed some signs of remorse, saying

“this never happened before and will not happen again.”

We’ll now have to think twice before giving those one-star ratings to anyone! Lest we incur the wrath of another reprobate computer geek leaving our lives ground to a halt because of his lack of emotional stability.