Judge: Amazon “cannot claim shock” that bathroom spycams were used as advertised | A West Virginia judge largely denied Amazon’s motion to dismiss lawsuit::A West Virginia judge largely denied Amazon’s motion to dismiss lawsuit.
Honestly, people have been ringing warning bells for a while regarding how Amazon facilitates illegal behavior, including:
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Products like this whose purpose is obviously got illegal purposes and even described as such
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Counterfeit/knockoff goods
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Unsafe and/or not adhering to legal regulations in the country which they are being sold (sometimes often faking the certification logos)
As somebody who has dealt with the latter two, I hope this lawsuit puts on enough hurt and/or spawns similar suits so that Amazon cleans their shit up. It’s enough advantage that they don’t need to stock local stores without them being able to constantly thumb their nose at the regulations actual B&M stores need to adhere to
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 from XGZDee, our latest new seller?”.
Pretending to be just a middle man does help these marketplaces, delivery and taxi apps. Wonder if they could be as profitable if they couldn’t make these claims. It seems being in a legal gray zone is their business model and iirc Amazon’s delivery is subcontracted to third parties on a paper too.
my favourite is negative ion “health” products, that actually do produce negative ions, because they are laced with radioactive thorium…
Funnily enough, the amount of such ions is miniscule.
So is radiation, though.
Even relatively small amounts of radiation can be problematic when in prolonged direct skin contact. The worst are the ones, that just have thorium oxide powder sprinkled on them tho. Only slightly radioactive, sure, but when ingested that can quickly cause serious harm!
Yep, health/beauty products, jewellery, and childrens toys are a big concern. A lot of people think they’re all the same and just buy the cheapest one
and then there’s stuff used for food prep…
I used Amazon to get a chemical that was illegal in Canada, but not America, and was sold on Amazon.ca, but delivered from the States.
That was a glorious day.
Reminds me of when I got an Instagram ad for an oil filter that was literally just a suppressor. Not even “ooh it’s not really a suppressor it’s just a solvent trap” nah it was a full length baffled suppressor.
was it listed at a price similar to an oil filter?
It was like $70. And they definitely weren’t serialized. It was an ad for some random Amazon seller. Then a month later I got the same ad, but for Temu instead.
I definitely didn’t click on it though. I didn’t feel like ending up on a list.
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Amazon’s Product Safety Team specifically inspected the camera
Could somebody please explain what this even means?
Real human employees saw the existence of the product. And did nothing.
They inspected the listing of the product by reading the characters of the primary key of the product. Inspection at it’s finest
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The plaintiff—a former Brazilian foreign exchange student then living in West Virginia—argued that Amazon had inspected the camera three times and its safety team had failed to prevent allegedly severe, foreseeable harms still affecting her today.
An amended complaint included a photo from Amazon’s product listing that showed bathroom towels hanging on hooks that disguised the hidden camera.
To the contrary, Chambers wrote that “if proven,” the plaintiff’s physical harms are considered “severe” because “emotional trauma inflicted during a child’s ‘tender years’ has an ‘indelible effect’ from which ‘they may never recover.’”
The plaintiff hopes a jury will decide that Amazon “had wanton, conscious, reckless, and outrageous indifference to the health, safety, and welfare of children.”
She has also alleged that Amazon “conspired” with the spy cam seller to “market and distribute a defective product both knew was intended and used for illegal and criminal purposes.”
Tech legal expert Eric Goldman wrote that a victory for the plaintiff could be considered “a dangerous ruling for the spy cam industry and for Amazon,” because “the court’s analysis could indicate that all surreptitious hook cameras are categorically illegal to sell.”
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