The problem I've always found with the California warnings is that they're so damn generic. There's nothing forcing companies to tell you what compound is harmful, where it is, or what it's used for..

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.

Or how much of it there is. Parts per million/billion?

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.

It would be much more useful if it were in the form of "This property contains substances determined by the state of California to be toxic to humans. The site report may be viewed in person at 123 Maple St, Suite 200, San Mateo, or electronically at https: //sitereport.ca.us/ "

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."

This is the same problem with the cookie law in Europe.

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.

TBH, you need to put a cookie warning only if you use cookies for stuff like tracking and advertising. Logins and general site functionality are extempt from that.

Basically, cookie warning on site means the site tracks you.

I did not know this. I do not think cookie warning == site tracking. Many of those pop-ups are people thinking they need it due to the law.

That supposes testing of that nature is actually done for every item/location that has one of those warnings. It is not. Testing is expensive. The costs if you lose a lawsuit due to not displaying the warning when you should have, even more so. People are pretty desensitized to seeing the warnings. So the logical decision made by many business owners is to display the warning even if no tests have been conducted showing the presence of the chemicals and sometimes even if there is no reason to believe there are any harmful chemicals at all. There's no penalty for displaying a superfluous warning.

Yes, it does suppose that.

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.

Even if they did, would it matter? It would be some chemical term, like the one you see in an ingedient list, that is meaningless to most people.

And these are places, not products...with gardens. Even if they use organic pesticides, they probably still have to put up the warning.

> that is meaningless to most people.

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!

I didn't say allowed or not. Sure, you should know that there are 15 ug of theomacrotasium among a hundred other things in your environment, but then what? Information overload means our decisions can get worse, not better, when presented with more of it.

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.

How about a warning that says "The battery in this cell phone contains an amount of theomacrotasium known to cause cancer if ingested."

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.

Hey, if it's just one thing, great! Now, how do you do that for a hundred things? Again, warnings work great for very small numbers of N.

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.

Well, information on how to migitate the cancer risk is already a step forward.

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.

If it is meaningful to only a small portion of the population then that portion should pay for obtaining this information and not force the rest to pay. If you add legal costs these warning like most of regulations are really expensive.

>And these are places, not products

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.

Ya, but what products? I'm sure California understood that it would be difficult for property managers to do a complete audit, so allowed this warning as a cop out (it might be that they have none of those chemicals, but who knows, we will put up the warning just in case).

It always trickles down. The property managers know who built the buildings. The construction company knows what companies produced the construction materials. The company that made the construction materials knows what chemicals are in them. That's the person who writes the warning, and the construction crew tells the property manager, and the property manager keeps a list in their office for public viewing.

I think it has more to do with the gardeners and maintnence than the orig construction. But ya, they so much as use a floor cleaner from the grocery store, that would have to be documented.

Depends what it's made of. An asbestos apartment building is kinda toxic.

Sure. Also, no one on china trusts each others apartment renovations for this reason, which is why you are expected to re-renovate every time you buy (and your own renovations do nothing for the resale value).

That stuff is actually easy to track down is what I meant. It is the day to day stuff that isn't.

>There's nothing forcing companies to tell you what compound is harmful, where it is.

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.

Some warnings speak of "specific birth defects" which is something greater than a may/might do something. Normally this is reserved for the class of chemicals and drugs that post-thalidomide are known to cause limb-reduction defects.

Funny story, we moved from china to California last year because my wife was pregnant and the environment over there is pretty pllluted. When she saw this warning at the entrance of our new apartment, she began doubting our move (they don't have that in china!).

Kid was born without defects.

When I was a kid I was put on an anti-acne drug known to cause such birth defects. Docs insist that any females wanting the drug be on birth control, some simply not prescribing it to any females who aren't open to a quick termination should they accidentally get pregnant while on the drug. There are things that we know for sure will cause serious harm. Too bad such warnings can get lost in the shuffle.

Interestingly, I want to know none of those things. I'd be more interested in knowing how statistically likely the chemicals are to increase my risk of getting cancer.

I would argue that without the prior information, the statistics are also irrelevant.

> This feels kind of like that.

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.

Right now I'm writing my bachelor's thesis on IoT platforms. I think the real problem is that there's no real established pattern for authentication (the way there is for things like signing up for a web app). You ship devices and there isn't a 'one true way' for authenticating them against your platform, authenticating the user, partnering the user with the device, and then encrypting all traffic from the device to the local or public network.

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.

Another thing about IoT gadgets and "smart"stuff in general, is the guaranteed obsolescence. It's not literally planned obsolescense, but when you install that wi-fi smartlock in your door, you know that it 5 years the company will stop updating the app that goes with it, and it won't work anymore under iOS 16, and so you'll have to throw it out and get a new lock, a new dimmer, a new garage door opener, new audio system, you name it.

> I think the real problem is that there's no real established pattern for authentication (the way there is for things like signing up for a web app).

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.

I agree with you, from the nerd perspective. The general public cares more about utility than privacy, unfortunately, but the equation is similar in both cases: are we getting more value than we’re giving up in control?

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.

I'd say 95% of IoT devices right now are from companies looking to jump on the bandwagon. The "iPod" of connected devices (i.e. actually useful) hasn't been discovered yet. Most products right now are just looking to tick a box for shareholders/investors.

Sidenote, those earbuds sound interesting. Could you point me to them?

> Sidenote, those earbuds sound interesting. Could you point me to them?

Bragi's The Dash: https://www.bragi.com/thedash/

Everything connected to the internet is a potential security and privacy risk. If they had a law requiring warning labels, then all products would just have to have that warning, regardless of whatever good design was applied to it (which is subjective and hard to judge, especially in the legal sense).

But ya, take out the internet connection, and no more problems. Take out the battery and the risk of fire/explosion also goes away.

> Everything connected to the internet is a potential security and privacy risk.

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.

I think you missed the satire in the post. Obviously these warnings couldn't be used in practice since they list exploits that would've been fixed upstream if the companies had found them before release.

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.

I once saw a sign on a door of a hotel in the bay area that said something like "this door leads to an area with stuff that can cause cancer". If you went through that door, you ended up outside.

Technically, the sign wasn't wrong, but come on California...

Also like the pervasive “this site uses cookies” warnings in Europe.

If that abomination didn't exist, it would make for a great satire post.

I've actually always appreciated that we have that... coming from a less liberal place, it made me feel like the state really cared about peoples' safety over the safety of corporations, and it's usually easy enough to find more information online about the compounds.

Trying using a CA compliant gas can to fill up your CA compliant riding mower then put said mower in reverse and back it out of wherever it's parked. For bonus points do so without a helper. Stickers and warnings are one thing. Mandating consumer safety features can go wrong easily.

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.)

Is it such a bad thing to value reduce emissions from some of the worst forms of easily avoidable pollution, i.e. spilled gas and two stoke engines?

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".)

Man, I hate those gas cans. I've used a bunch of different cans with "safety" nozzles, and every time I get gas on the equipment, the can, the ground, my hands, etc. They're much worse than what we had before.

The signs in California aren't useless because the signs are useless; they're useless because of the specific implementation.

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".

Edit: I might be wrong and I have to go before I can get sources on it.

How did you arrive at this idea? I looked into it and it seems the list has very formal requirements for inclusion and they give the specific reason for inclusion for each chemical https://oehha.ca.gov/chemicals I guess that technically under the law the governor decides the final list but the actual compilation of the list has been delegated to oehha which has created formal requirements for inclusion.

What chemicals do you think have been included without scientific basis?

They also miss a lot of things that do contain or emit chemicals that cause cancer, like dryer sheets.

Found my citation for that: http://www.drsteinemann.com/Articles/Steinemann%20et%20al.%2...

I think the current champion for disgusting-but-necessarily-put-out-of-mind required California signage is the "pool diarrhea rules". See for example:

https://boingboing.net/2016/09/07/the-messy-fight-to-stop-ca...

I have always wondered if you included both what was cancer causing and what it would cost the company/location to get rid of it on the sign it would be even better.

It's what I call the WebMD problem, though it's much older. WebMD has to put 'cancer' as possible cause for nearly every symptom because otherwise they risk huge lawsuits. Another shining example is some chainsaws having the warning label 'do not stop saw with hands or genitals'. I've always wondered, to Europeans, sue happy cultures like China or America look absolutely bonkers, but how do these cultures view Europe where it concerns that segment of society.. toothless? Sensible?

I find the phrasing so funny, "known to the State of California to Cause Cancer", as if the State of California had any bearing on evidence or scientific truth.