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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

You as a customer can already give the manufacturer that choice, and simple refuse to buy from any manufacturer that doesn't comply.

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I've been not-buying IOT trash as hard as I can for decades. But nothing's changing... please tell me how to do this correctly!

Well, lots of people have been not-buying liquorice their whole life, but nothing's changing. The market for liquorice candy is alive and well.

Less snarky: if other people still want to buy certain products, manufacturers will provide. But that's not a bad thing. Different folks have different preferences.

Why did you suggest not-buying as a better action than regulation if you acknowledge that it doesn't work? Are you a manufacturer of low-quality IoT devices? People don't prefer insecure devices, they just want convenience and manufacturers are not being upfront about how dangerous these "convenient" devices are. Ergo, regulation.

Convenience and low price are legitimate preferences, even if you disagree.

Not when the consumer doesn't know the trade off they are making. Buying a bottle of colorful poison and drinking it and dying because it looked tasty is not a legitimate preference.

You are being willfully ignorant of the power dynamics and information disparity that exist between manufacturers and consumers. The whole point of the label is to better inform consumers.

Insecure IOT has the huge externality of providing muscle to criminal botnets, though.

Tax them, then?

Consumer's power is not the same as FCC's

Indeed. And that's good.

It's good that consumers have much less power in context of forcing manufacturers to the described choice?

What do you mean by less power? It's different.

One manufacturer can't force you to buy stuff you don't want, nor ban you from buying from a different manufacturer that does what you want.

(In contrast with the FCC, which has a lot of power over you, by banning you from buying what you want.)

What if no or very few manufacturers produce a thing, yet the thing would be very beneficial to many owners?

Why would one want specifically to buy a product not conforming to the choice described in the first-level comment?

> What if no or very few manufacturers produce a thing, yet the thing would be very beneficial to many owners?

If it's useful enough, and the existing manufacturers leave significant customer needs unfilled, competing suppliers can step in.

> Why would one want specifically to buy a product not conforming to the choice described in the first-level comment?

All kinds of reasons. It might be cheaper, for example.

So what we need is giant warning stickers on products of which their parent companies don't follow good practices. Kind of like tobacco products.

"Leaks your personal data to unknown servers" Or "Manufacturer typically does not support their products beyond 2 years after which critical features and functions may stop working"

A relatively small group of people won't have an effect, that's why regulation plays an important role.

Perhaps we should respect the wishes of the large rest of the people who are outside that relatively small group?

Ignorance is not a wish. We're talking about users that don't know any better when buying products

Are there any that currently do comply?

Many large companies open their wallets to buy hardware (and software) that comes with guaranteed long term support.

If you are willing to pay, manufacturers are happy to comply with a lot of weird requests.

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