One problem I see with your analogy is that the dangerous lawnmower can cause an easily quantifiable harm.

You have to be able to show damages you incurred and assign a dollar value to them to sue people.

That doesn’t work at all for a something that sells your bandwidth to a proxy service. People wouldn’t even be aware that it was happening they weren’t told.

What about when the police show up because some highly illegal content was traced to your IP address? Will they believe that you were the unwitting victim of a rogue proxy server running on your streaming stick? Would you have even been aware of that possibility?

There's also always the flip side: When the police shows up because of your illegal acitivities, you have a rogue proxy server running. All bought in good faith of course.

Not legal advice.

(It would surprise me greatly if we as a society let these gadgets be sold openly from here on.)

That shows the problem or trying to link an IP address to an individual.

Believe it or not, that is what happens when the police show up to the house of a primary school teacher. They will think they have the wrong address. Even US police.

The cybercrime raids happen when they run into someone who looks like a hacker and has a lot of computers.

Except the devices are not dangerous. Its the software installed on the device. Consumers have a choice. Pay for the trusted Apple TV or Amazon firestick, or go the wild west and see what's on offer.

with the devices mentioned in the article, there is no consent requested, and the malicious apps are installed either before the box is sold or after as a requirement for getting the streaming services to work.

You call them malicious apps but what is the evidence they are more malicious than the things they fight against?

Really? You'd be ok with me putting a proxy server on your home network then, which anyone with a few bucks can use to attach your IP address and subscriber details to anything they choose to request from the internet? How about a Tor exit node?

Its incredibly obvious to anyone applying any thought at all to this that its a malicious to sell a product that labels itself as a TV streaming stick which is in fact a paid for relay server with the money made from providing the internet connection to a random third party unrelated to the person who bought the thing without ever telling the customer.

Yeah I actually do several of those to earn a few bucks.

The typical consumer has no idea what they're buying, and they shouldn't have to because the retailer selling the product should have done some basic due diligence before stocking the thing. People aren't going to some clearly shady Chinese website and buying a device labelled "cheap TV streaming stick, will sublease your internet connection to criminals", they're putting "FireTV" into amazon.com and somehow being presented with these things alongside the Amazon FireTV they expect to find, or maybe "streaming stick" which really shouldn't be surfacing clearly malicious products.

If the average consumer did get a disclaimer it would sublease their internet connection to a few criminals and a lot of people who aren't criminals, would they care?

> If I open my own line of home improvement stores and do no oversight on what I sell and wind up selling really dangerous lawnmowers, I'm partly responsible.

While there would be oversight, it is highly unlikely that a person opening a home improvement store would perform any meaningful safety testing. They simply would not be qualified. The oversight would lay in selling certified products, pulling recalled products off the shelf, and (perhaps) removing products if there is a reason to suspect safety issues.

Now consider streaming sticks. There are safety standards for the physical device but, to my knowledge, there are no such standards for the software itself. Heck, there aren't even standards for the engineers who work on the software. One can make highly prejudiced decisions based upon the country of origin. Perhaps there are even good reasons to avoid products from certain countries. Yet the lack of standards also means that products from trustworthy sources can be suspect, since all it takes is a management decision to change things.

But these products aren't dangerous. And proxying internet traffic isn't illegal. Fake ad clicks may be illegal but that falls on whoever is providing that service, which isn't the proxy or the resident. On what basis would you ban them?