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.