This feels kind of like that.
A fishing sinker made from lead is pretty obvious when you see that warning. There's only one ingredient, lead, and it's obvious why it's harmful. But when you buy a complex product that says "this product contains chemicals known by the State of California to cause cancer or birth defects", the first thing I want to know is what the chemical is, the second is where it is in the product, and the third is why it's there. Nothing in the warnings makes manufacturers tell you any useful information.
And these are places, not products...with gardens. Even if they use organic pesticides, they probably still have to put up the warning.
Therefore no people should be allowed to know?
For what it's worth, I'm not in favour of California's labelling requirements either. But just because something is meaningless to the majority of the population doesn't mean it's meaningless to the entire population. And it is specifically the population that is interested in knowing it that finds it least meaningless!
What would be more meaningful: certifications that act as abstractions for complex problems. Organic kind of acts like this already, and of course there are multiple federal certs for electronics. Having a functioning regulatory system as well as a working civil law system also help.
That's a completely actionable warning. Don't eat the contents of the battery of your cell phone.
Or how about "This carpet contains formeldahyde, which is known to cause birth defects in pregnant women. Limit exposure to this carpet for a few days after installation."
That's a good warning. That tells me what I need to know, what the risks are, and how to mitigate it.
We have to find a middle ground between "has chemicals that may cause cancer" and "a hundred specific chemicals in X quantities that may cause cancer." Abstraction is very necessary as a pragmatic solution, even if full disclosure makes sense as an ideal.
Heck, most places are just doing CYA, they have no idea what specific lists of chemicals their contractors use. For the IoT case, no one has any idea how their devices can be exploited, and merely admit the possibility of exploitation. But that is another issue.
If it is only harmful if ingested you know not to give it to your toddler. If it gives off toxic fumes while burning, well, stay away if you made a fire mistake. etc. The warning itself is pretty useless as it is.
Those places have products that contain the toxic chemical, An apartment building is not poisonous by itself, they contain products that contain the harmful chemical. That's what they should be warning you about.
That stuff is actually easy to track down is what I meant. It is the day to day stuff that isn't.
I'm pretty interested in how much cadmium and mercury gets into my system because they're bad news for the brain. At the same time, mercury is also in air so it's kind of inescapable. Parts per billion is interesting information because then I can control how much I ingest the way I do for food that is fattening.
Then the print report would basically be a binder full of MSDS-like information sheets, along with the history of measurements recorded on the site.
Online, you could see the threshold levels for single massive exposure and for casual environmental or daily occupational exposures. And maybe enter your age, sex, and weight in kg, to see how likely it is that living in your apartment will kill you.
The generic warning is useless. It ranges from "last month someone found 30cm of thermal receipt paper with bisphenol-A all over it" to "someone once dumped a 55gal drum full of dioxin right into the soil where your vegetable garden is now."
They allowed one single, generic, disclaimer which every site pops up.
If they'd demanded:
- a separate disclaimer for each domain (or at least company) setting a cookie
- a description of the purpose of the cookies (e.g. advertising, remembering log-ins)
Then the law might have actually achieved something.
Basically, cookie warning on site means the site tracks you.
That people display the warning without specific knowledge of a hazardous substance is the fault of the California legislature for passing laws that provide perverse incentives to do that.
If a business could be held liable for posting the warning without a reason why, those warnings would not appear without reason. Ambulance-chaser attorneys perform a kind of arbitrage there, as private-party enforcers, like finding ADA violations at a non-accessible business and suing to force them to settle and make reasonable accommodations, or fight it, pay fines, and make reasonable accommodations. Or like the Florida folks that test their Sunshine Law against various municipal organizations. The munis are forced to settle and open their records, or fight it, pay fines, and open their records.
I guarantee there would be at least one person in California that would go around checking for warnings and asking for the MSDS reports on the hazardous materials on the property. I asked for a MSDS once, and the building manager just about lost his mind. I just thought I smelled toluene, and wanted to check to see if I was right. Their reaction made me think that maybe someone should have been suing someone, and they were just worried that it was going to be me.
As with any complex system, it's the squeaky wheels that get greased. More sensible laws would make California less an object of ridicule for other states. Indiana takes a lot of flak over the pi thing, and Kentucky and Tennessee occasionally get their "ice cream cone in the back pocket" laws waved around, but those are just silly artifacts of law. The California "causes cancer warning" law affects so many businesses, even those outside the state.
Kid was born without defects.
This is changing. But you still have the problem of over reporting. There are provisions to verify that your use of the material is safe, but it's so much easier, and so much less risky, to just slap the label on.
It might feel like that, but it isn't. Everything[1] causes cancer. Not everything needs to have an Internet connection to a service to function, not essentially at least. It's only these people looking to monetize or "h0ok all teh th7ngs up!!1!eleven!" that are shoveling crap that no one asked for, but everyone is too lazy to object to. I've got a pair of wireless earbuds, completely modern kickstarted project. They function not just without an Internet connection, but even without a paired device. You can load music onto them like an iPod (remember them? they didn't have to be connected to a cloud to have thousands of songs).
Good design is possible if you care; bad design is trying to shoehorn required "connectivity" into something that doesn't need it.
[1] - For certain values of everything.
But ya, take out the internet connection, and no more problems. Take out the battery and the risk of fire/explosion also goes away.
Yes, that's true. What I'm saying is that not everything needs to be connected to the Internet, and requiring things to be connected to function fully is stupid and anti-consumer. By requiring the label on things that don't essentially need an Internet connection, it would allow those of us discerning consumers to avoid the crappy products.
> But ya, take out the internet connection, and no more problems. Take out the battery and the risk of fire/explosion also goes away.
The fire/explosion risk doesn't go away (power bricks have been known to cause fires). And electricity is essential to electronic devices functioning; Internet connectivity is not.
Sidenote, those earbuds sound interesting. Could you point me to them?
Bragi's The Dash: https://www.bragi.com/thedash/
Everybody uses their own homegrown solution, which depends heavily on the hardware they have to work with. This means that some companies get it right and many get it wrong. Yeah, the biggest problem is companies shoehorning connectivity to products, but the second biggest problem is that there really isn't a standard for securing that connectivity.
No. The real problem is that a device you bought requires internet access for no good reason, spies on you ("collects information") with no good reason, and becomes useless garbage once the company that sells it goes out of business or decides to terminate the product line or just grows to dislike you, all that for your lightbulb in the toilet to dim to the beat of played music.
For IoT to be useful at all, the devices would need substantial configuration possibilities, like where and with what protocol send data to, or better yet, whom to allow to fetch data from the device. But this would be only for hobbysts, as general public is not interested in tinkering.
Much as HyperCard, Excel, etc have allowed non-nerds to solve their own problems or scratch an itch, there is room in IoT for these people to tinker. They just need the right tools and framing.
One exception might be the vibrator spyware "feature" which was clearly on purpose.
I took it more as a jab at the terrible software practices in this IoT goldrush than a serious proposal to add actual warning labels to their packaging.
Technically, the sign wasn't wrong, but come on California...
In some areas "this product not for sale in CA" is a marketable feature. On small engines it means it's tuned to run well instead of minimum emissions. For gas cans it means you don't need three hands to pour from them. For riding mowers it means you don't need to go out of your way to engage several redundant safety mechanisms in order to operate it (In addition to reasonable safeties like a seat switch and shifter that can't easily be bumped).
I can't think of one off the top of my head but I'm sure there's equally "pants on head" consumer safety laws about things other than garden/lawn equipment and/or in states/countries other than CA.
(BTW, this is post is the cliff notes of a conversation I had with my coworkers at a tech company so it's not like we're a bunch of hicks complaining that the guards on our saws prevent us from fitting oversized blades.)
If you were around when the air quality in LA was almost as bad as what we are seeing now in places like Beijing, you might agree with some of the provisions that were enacted (and were hugely successful at reducing pollution not only in CA, but elsewhere due to said "features".)
If you do have an area with known-dangerous substances, and don't put up the sign, you get hit with a penalty significant enough to hurt. If you don't have anything dangerous, but do put up a sign, nothing bad happens to you. So rather than actually check for what's there and put up the sign only when relevant, everyone errs on the side of "better put up the sign just in case".
What chemicals do you think have been included without scientific basis?
https://boingboing.net/2016/09/07/the-messy-fight-to-stop-ca...