[unwise-exe]

I thought advertising and marketing materials were expected to exaggerate things to the point of blatant falsehood.

Is that changing, or is this company being singled out for some reason, or are they really that much worse than everyone else?

[Zak]

It is, and has long been illegal to make false statements of fact in marketing materials.

Puffery, on the other hand is allowed. That usually entails non-falsifiable statements like "Evolv is the best way to detect guns". "Best" doesn't really mean anything because there are a bunch of tradeoffs that go into designing a security screening system.

[conover]

Right. "The world's best cookie". I think the idea is that no reasonable person would understand that statement to mean that literally, of all the cookies in the world, this one right here is the best.

[Zak]

At least equally important to whether a reasonable person would take it literally is that there's no way to prove it isn't. If I call something the best cookie, the closest thing that has to a concrete meaning is "I like it better than any other cookie".

[kjs3]

In the US (YMMV) there's a distinction in advertising between exaggeration for effect, like "this expensive cream will make you beautiful", and straight up falsification like "we can detect all guns everywhere" when you demonstrably can't.

[skywhopper]

It’s illegal, and has been for many decades. It’s not enforced nearly as often or as strictly as it should be.