What If We Put Warnings on IoT Devices?

WARNINGS:

WARNING: This product warps space and time in its vicinity.

WARNING: This product attracts every other piece of matter in the universe, including the products of other manufacturers, with a force proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to the distance between them.

CAUTION: The mass of this product contains the energy equivalent of 85 million tons of TNT per net ounce of weight.

HANDLE WITH EXTREME CARE: This product contains minute electrically charged particles moving at velocities in excess of five hundred million miles per hour.

CONSUMER NOTICE: Because of the "uncertainty principle," it is impossible for the consumer to find out at the same time both precisely where this product is and how fast it is moving.

ADVISORY: There is an extremely small but nonzero chance that, through a process known as "tunneling," this product may spontaneously disappear from its present location and reappear at any random place in the universe, including your neighbor's domicile. The manufacturer will not be responsible for any damages or inconveniences that may result.

READ THIS BEFORE OPENING PACKAGE: According to certain suggested versions of the Grand Unified Theory, the primary particles constituting this product may decay to nothingness within the next four hundred million years.

THIS IS A 100% MATTER PRODUCT: In the unlikely event that this merchandise should contact antimatter in any form, a catastrophic explosion will result.

PUBLIC NOTICE AS REQUIRED BY LAW: Any use of this product, in any manner whatsoever, will increase the amount of disorder in the universe. Although no liability is implied herein, the consumer is warned that this process will ultimately lead to the heat death of the universe.

NOTE: The most fundamental particles in this product are held together by a "gluing" force about which little is currently known and whose adhesive power can therefore not be permanently guaranteed.

ATTENTION: Despite any other listing of product contents found hereon, the consumer is advised that, in actuality, this product consists of 99.9999999999% empty space.

NEW GRAND UNIFIED THEORY DISCLAIMER: The manufacturer may technically be entitled to claim that this product is ten-dimensional. However, the consumer is reminded that this confers no legal rights above and beyond those applicable to three-dimensional objects, since the seven new dimensions are "rolled up" into such a small "area" that they cannot be detected.

PLEASE NOTE: Some quantum physics theories suggest that when the consumer is not directly observing this product, it may cease to exist or will exist only in a vague and undetermined state.

COMPONENT EQUIVALENCY NOTICE: The subatomic particles (electrons, protons, etc.) comprising this product are exactly the same in every measurable respect as those used in the products of other manufacturers, and no claim to the contrary may legitimately be expressed or implied.

HEALTH WARNING: Care should be taken when lifting this product, since its mass, and thus its weight, is dependent on its velocity relative to the user.

IMPORTANT NOTICE TO PURCHASERS: The entire physical universe, including this product, may one day collapse back into an infinitesimally small space. Should another universe subsequently re-emerge, the existence of this product in that universe cannot be guaranteed.

I'm of the opinion that products which require a separate service to perform their advertised functions (i.e. a "cloud" service-- be it "free" with the product or subscription-based) should be clearly labeled as such. I know that I don't actually own anything that I can't self-host (or pay whoever I want to host it), but it's clear that most people don't. Public education on this front seems valuable to me (but, then, I'm one of those crazy people who believes in standards-based protocols and commodity hosting service).

Yes. A couple years ago I bought a network-attached hard drive with some kind of cloud backup service bundled (the current marketing-speak seems to be "personal cloud"); fortunately I did a little extra reading before opening it, because it wouldn't even let you set it up for local access without registering an account on the cloud service.

Interesting idea. I wonder how this would look like on commercial software packages :-) Yeah I'm an oldschooler that remembers buying software and games in actual physical boxes!!!

Simple rule: I buy it, I own it and it should not need an external service to operate. If it does then I'm not buying it.

None of those grafted on services for me, I really have yet to see anything that was so compelling that I would give up and consent to essentially renting a device and having an account with some service to make it useful.

That way you also don't need to warn anybody about the lousy security, I'm 100% convinced that those companies that are exploited are merely the tip of the iceberg, that for each of these there are a vast multiple that were exploited but never found out and that the remainder also isn't as secure as they should be.

Running a secure service with devices in the field is hard, harder than I give most companies credit for and those companies that could pull it off (Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and a couple of others) are usually the ones that I would trust even less with my data because of their ability to add it to the pile they already have.