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by digging 1021 days ago
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!
1 comments

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?