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Comment by stestagg | Hacker News Reader

Just as if you were to buy a child’s toy that has a secret embedded camera that streams to some foreign server.

It may be the manufacturers fault, but the person who sold it to you (the provider) is liable.

Should be the same here

I think it's a little bit more complicated. There's a point where this becomes somewhat questionable. Say the toy has a reputable certification and the company, up until now, never had any track record of mistreating their customers. In this case I'd argue the company is responsible, not the parent, and that it is actually worthy following through to find whoever acted maliciously rather than just picking the last person in the chain.

Now in the particular case of ads in applications, I think there are surely many developers who fail to do their due diligence when picking advertisement partners, but without a doubt there are also advertisement companies who excel at duping the developers they work with.

If you want to sell a product, you are liable for that product. It's simple.

Excessive trust is negligent. Let the market decide how to mitigate risk, but eliminating the risk creates opportunity for profiting from malfeasance.

If someone trades a product with a neighbor, are they liable since they sold it for a different form of currency? Or would this only be aimed at those who reach a certain level of trading/selling per year?

Right, and from the POV of the child, the parent is liable.

Liable is a bit strong word here, liability without fault is mainly rejected concept in modern world.

If so, why is the retailer liable but not the parent?

I think retailer's liability here is also limited.

Imagine you are a shop selling cola in can.

If coca cola company put some unhealthy stuff in, you are not liable just for selling it. But if you made the stuff unhealthy because you stored it in direct sunlight long time, you are liable.

Because the parent is a natural person and the retailer is the last commercial entity in the chain. If the purchaser was a day-care center or other commercial entity, liability would be with them.

"without fault"? Is it reasonable to assume that a cheap internet connected toy with a video camera and microphone is secure enough to use without any precautions?

" secret embedded camera "

I bought "child's toy" and sold you "child's today", you expect seller to check every toy if there is "secret camera" ?

Yeah, I expect the seller to know what they're selling.

Interesting. So if you buy such a device for a gift, not knowing that it has a secret camera, and then decide you don't want it and resell it on Ebay, you'd agree that now it is you who are liable?

Sorry I don't have anything more substantive to add, but yes, I would be liable.

caveat emptor

This is settled now, everyone says google shouldn't have put a secret camera in their fancy thermostats:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19407147

The child is crying, because the parent took the toy away.

> the person who sold it to you (the provider) is liable

I don't think that's true unless they knew it had this behavior or were negligent in some way.

That's how consumer law works nearly everywhere: every party has full (civil) liability over the outcome. The parties can then sue each other to settle it, without involvement of the consumer.

> or were negligent in some way

I'm not sure what to call allowing any old shit to run in your app under the guise of ads other than negligent. The fact that it's so common should not be an excuse.

Liability seems to be focused on pointing blame, and then based on that we decide who should clean up.

In situations like this perhaps it would be more productive if we had a system that focused more getting everyone to clean up and prevent this from happening again first, and then look at the liability part.

I do believe that this is the innate human response, the desire to "do the right thing". Most of us have the right mixture of nature/nurture to want to do that. But if the system doesn't enable that behavior or punishes that, that behavior will get suppressed and we end up in a miserable situation for everybody.

I dunno, it's not exactly an easy question or it would be solved already, and bad faith actors will exploit the goodwill of others too.

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