The maker of an Internet of Things garage door opener is gaining attention for all the wrong reasons after he disabled the installation of a customer who had left a negative review.

Denis Grisak founded a company called SoftComplex that launched Garadget, an IoT device that allows users to control their garage doors remotely, following a successful Indiegogo crowdfunding earlier this year. The $99 Garadget is a device that can be retrofitted to any garage door that currently has a mechanical opening system. It allows users not only to control their garage door remotely via an app but also to receive alerts when a garage door has been left open.

So far the story may sound like a positive one given that at $99, it’s an appealing offering. But perhaps what wasn’t factored in by those who contributed to the crowdfunding campaign for the device was Grisak’s temperament, or in this case his considered lack of having a good one.

A customer by the name of R. Martin purchased the Garadget from Amazon.com but found that the device didn’t work quite as advertised. In particular, he claimed that the iPhone app was buggy.

After initially taking to the Garadget forums to complain about his issues, including referring to the app as being “piece of shit,” Martin followed up with a one-star review on Amazon, writing “Junk – DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY – iPhone app is a piece of junk, crashes constantly, start-up company that obviously has not performed proper quality assurance tests on their products.”

Suffice to say, Grisak didn’t take kindly to the negative review, writing on the Garadget forum:

Martin,

The abusive language here and in your negative Amazon review, submitted minutes after experiencing a technical difficulty, only demonstrates your poor impulse control. I’m happy to provide the technical support to the customers on my Saturday night but I’m not going to tolerate any tantrums.

At this time your only option is return Garadget to Amazon for refund. Your unit ID 2f0036… will be denied server connection.

The last sentence is the key line: Grisak bricked Martin’s Garadget.

Grisak has since backtracked, telling the Los Angeles Times that his decision to brick the device was a wrong one. “Obviously it was a mistake,” Grisak said. “I was overprotective of my product and it was hard to take this criticism. It’s not going to happen again.”

Backflip aside, the ability for manufacturers to remotely disable legitimately purchased IoT devices raises serious concerns, if only because it doesn’t make the IoT industry look great.

“The bottom line is that it’s already a hard sell to get people to embrace the so-called internet-of-things,” CSS Insight analyst Ben Wood told the BBC. “In particular, there’s a huge amount of trust involved in having something that can open your doors. When incidents like this happen, it makes it even harder to get these kind of products into people’s homes. This was a very ill-advised move.”

Photo: Amazon