A U.S. government agency says Amazon is responsible for hazardous products sold on its platform by third-party sellers and shipped by the company. The U.S.

Amazon is responsible under federal safety law for hazardous products sold on its platform by third-party sellers and shipped by the company, a U.S. government agency ordered Tuesday.

In a unanimous vote, the Consumer Product Safety Commission said it determined that the e-commerce company was a “distributor” of faulty items sold on its site and packed and shipped through its fulfillment service.

That means the company is on the hook, legally, for the recalls of more than 400,000 products, including hairdryers and defective carbon monoxide detectors, the agency said. It ordered Amazon to come up with a system for notifying customers who purchased faulty items and to remove the products from circulation by offering incentives for their return or destruction.

Amazon said it planned to appeal the decision in court.

  • skuzz
    2·
    2 months ago

    Thanks, I appreciate the advice! I’ve been pretty adept at filtering but it’s just so exhausting. It’s like going through a truth table before clicking buy.

    Then vendors like Amazon have been doubling down on the ghoulish behavior doing things like changing filter options, example:

    • Go search Amazon in a private browser for “desk fan”
    • You’ll see a list of manufacturers, generally one or two name brands and a bunch of made up consonant-filled Chinese fake names
    • Click on a name brand, (as often when searching for something I might want to say, compare Black & Decker to Honeywell) then the page refreshes
    • The list of brands changes, removing the other name brand, and only showing the CIEWJJOE Chinese brands as further filtering options
    • Only real way around this, per se, is to open multiple browser tabs and sort one name brand vendor per tab

    What’s worse, is for a year or so, this sorting worked correctly if you had Prime, and incorrectly if you did not have Prime. Then (probably when nobody noticed enough to complain) they made it so it was broken on both Prime and non-Prime.

    Although, I’m trying to reproduce this issue both on Prime and private browsing non-Prime and it looks like for the first time since the pandemic, their product filter may finally be fixed. Probably all the legal heat on them right now is making them shape up and stop this dark pattern before it’s noticed by someone with power to do things.