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Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised

arstechnica.com

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Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised

#111

Post by jacquesm »

pixl97 wrote: post #105
jacquesm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but that pretty much proves the person is not acting in good faith. normal use of spycam -> spying. normal use of beer bottle -> holding beer.

> normal use of beer bottle -> holding beer. That's actually a poor argument if you want to get that level to detail. Bottles are just bottles. The label and fluid you put in define if it's a beer bottle. The same bottle could be a soda bottle. Again, coming back to cameras this will get problematic really fast. What if I just make a very small camera "for integration into other devices". I mean, sounds perfectly leg…

I think you just like arguing for arguing's sake so I will bow out here.

Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised

#112

Post by metadat »

chias wrote: post #100
metadat wrote: post #4

Is there an archive snapshot of the Towel bar Cam product page as displayed by Amazon? Kinda wondering what the product actually looks like, and how Amazon allowed it to be presented. Edit: whoa, @navels how'd you do that?! Thank you, amazing: https://web.archive.org/web/20230527030738/https://www.amazo... The product reviews are creepy. -- Rest of my comment for posterity: There's an image in TFA, though it's only a…

Dear courts, do this one next https://www.amazon.com/Bathroom-Shower-Security-Cameras-Outd... The product description is... wild.

Even while the lawsuit unfolds, Amazon still hasn't done a sweep.

Should I be shocked?

Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised

#113

Post by hnburnsy »

Sort of related...

https://www.kxan.com/investigations/son-of-buc-ees-co-founde...

>The son of a co-founder of the nationally renowned Buc-ee’s convenience store was arrested Tuesday in Travis County and faces 28 separate state jail felony charges of invasive visual recordings. A woman reported she and a few friends were visiting the lake house with Mitchell Wasek when one friend, who works cybersecurity for the Department of Defense, noticed a charging port with a hidden camera plugged into the wall of their bathroom, court records state. The group of friends left with the camera and on its micro-card found dozens of videos of themselves and other people in bathrooms and bedrooms at the lake house as well as at Mitchell Wasek’s Dallas apartment, according to court records.

Another story reports...

>Amazon records linked purchases of a half-dozen spy cameras and hidden cameras to Mitchell Wasek, the affidavit says.

Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised

#114

Post by Pxtl »

grobbyy wrote: post #72
Pxtl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I'm quite tired of hearing "it's not our fault that toys full of lead were sold on our storefront and stored, fulfilled, and shipped from our warehouse in boxes bearing our logo! When we said that we 'recommend' the product, we meant, like, algorithmically, not for realsies. We had nothing to do with these products! It's all XGZDoo, a company we kicked off the store. And now would you like to buy any products fr…

I like having a Wild West, but it should be clearly advertised as such. AliExpress and eBay are clearly Wild West platforms and I appreciate them. Getting scammed on Amazon is different. Amazon should be fully liable since very sophisticated customers can be confused by commingling, marketplace settlers, algorithmic recommendations, etc. all designed to look legitimate to the unwary while being completely unsafe. I s…

Right? Maybe at this point it's mostly historical inertia and they've converged to similar UIs, but the mental brand people have for these companies is very different.

eBay is buying from Some Guy. AliExpress is buying from a sketchy unlicensed and unregulated warehouse in China. Amazon is a store. These are the reputations they cultivated for themselves.

Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised

#115

Post by redserk »

Sanzig wrote: post #13

Good. Amazon has been happy to rake in commissions for years from dodgy products sold by third party sellers (uncertified electrical equipment, scam flash drives/SSDs, spycams, etc) and then turn around and blame the marketplace sellers when the inevitable happens. Unlike eBay, Amazon goes to great lengths to sow confusion about what it sells versus its marketplace participants. The average user thinks that when they…

The wild thing is, Amazon’s first-party offerings generally stand out well by itself! They don’t need to trick people with Marketplace junk. They could completely drop the marketplace and still be, IMO, the most useful shopping subscription.

I can get my weekly groceries, soap, toilet paper, a TV, and socks with a handful of clicks. On my doorstep. The same day I click. No driving to a store, no walking around, just grab off my doorstep. This is the entire reason I find Amazon worth it (even a steal!). I don’t care for millions and millions of items, of which many are duplicitous clones.

This marketplace trend has been completely ridiculous and I hope Amazon (among others!) are found to be just as responsible for what’s sold. A lot of electronics I’ve seen are dodgy at best, but very clearly dangerous at their worst. If there’s a problem, just spin up a new nonsense “brand name” to mask the problems of the former one.

This marketplace trend has completely turned me off from other websites. Target and Walmart’s websites are immensely frustrating. I haven’t used Newegg in ages.

Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised

#116

Post by autoexec »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #94
neilv wrote: post #40

I'd expect Amazon product safety people to know what these are. Spycams have been widely advertised for decades, often overtly targeted specifically for use of spying on women. For example, pretty early in Web history (before WiFi and then IoT were popular), "X10" cameras were advertised heavily: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kuan/x10.html

I mean it's a spy camera that only makes sense in a bathroom. There's even a showerhead one sold on Amazon. I'm not even sure it's humanly possible to look at one of these and not realise the primary use case is criminal. The only conclusion I'm left to draw from this is either that no actual review takes place, or that the review is merely there to ascertain "is this product literally illegal right now?"

You can create convoluted excuses for the showercam too. For example, cases where you wanted to keep an eye on a babysitter while they bathed your child or a nurse or caretaker bathing an adult/elderly family member who was disabled.

Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised

#117

Post by tyingq »

bdw5204 wrote: post #9

A spy camera that looks like a towel hook seems like a product that should be illegal to sell. For what legitimate purpose would somebody want a towel hook camera? Don't most people put towel hooks in bathrooms? It seems perfectly reasonable to hold Amazon legally responsible for selling this product even if it was a 3rd party seller (not clear from the article). A product whose intended use is to secretly record vid…

I guess you could argue nanny cam for when the kid is being bathed, but of course, that's not the only activity it would monitor.

Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised

#118

Post by JohnFen »

redserk wrote: post #115
Sanzig wrote: post #13

Good. Amazon has been happy to rake in commissions for years from dodgy products sold by third party sellers (uncertified electrical equipment, scam flash drives/SSDs, spycams, etc) and then turn around and blame the marketplace sellers when the inevitable happens. Unlike eBay, Amazon goes to great lengths to sow confusion about what it sells versus its marketplace participants. The average user thinks that when they…

The wild thing is, Amazon’s first-party offerings generally stand out well by itself! They don’t need to trick people with Marketplace junk. They could completely drop the marketplace and still be, IMO, the most useful shopping subscription. I can get my weekly groceries, soap, toilet paper, a TV, and socks with a handful of clicks. On my doorstep. The same day I click. No driving to a store, no walking around, just…

> This marketplace trend has completely turned me off from other websites

If I can't find what I want in a local store, I order directly from manufacturer's websites instead of using any online marketplace (when possible -- which is the majority of the time).

Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised

#119

Post by wiml »

JohnFen wrote: post #107
voytec wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon has been happy to rake in commissions for years from dodgy products sold by third party sellers (...) and then turn around and blame the marketplace sellers when the inevitable happens. They've also been happy with making it harder for the customer to choose a particular seller (especially one w/o Amazon Storefront site)

This is the main reason why I stopped buying things from Amazon. It became too difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, in part because it became 90% chaff.

I've started using Amazon's website to find a product and then going to the seller's website to buy it... what goes around comes around, I guess.

Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised

#120

Post by autoexec »

Someone1234 wrote: post #6

I love technology, but some things we're able to build today cheaply and using mass-market parts concerns me. Hidden cameras can be so good now that it is impractical for someone to find them. You may disagree with that assertion, but I'd put to you that maybe you just haven't seen some of the top-end products where the only clue is pin-hole sized, or even invisible like hidden behind the LCD screen of a set top box/…

At lest in this case it was not a top-end product. The girl found out about it and interestingly she's even accusing amazon of "marketing and distributing a defective product"
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