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I haven't seen it phrased that way before, and now that I have, I simultaneously accept the logic of it and am horrified by the bureaucratic churn that must spi

I haven't seen it phrased that way before, and now that I have, I simultaneously accept the logic of it and am horrified by the bureaucratic churn that must spin up just to ferry legal responsibility to (in theory) the correct party.

ArnoVW 6y ago
'luckily' it is expensive to sue, so everything works out. Consider the alternative: the laptop you bought on Amazon catches fire and burns down the school of your daughter. The school contacts your insurance, who now has to contact a component supplier in Shenzen (who supplied the power supply), and sue them under Chinese law, instead of Amazon.
munk-a 6y ago
I think that this can end up resulting in less bureaucratic churn then the other approach. In this particular case a bunch of users had their data forwarded by one entity - if CA had harvested data from multiple sources using the Facebook API then I think it'd be unreasonable for those users to need to legally pursue each terms violator - Facebook may also refuse to share the identity of the breach for a variety of reasons[1] making the lawsuit without an identified defendant which doesn't really help matters. 1. Proprietary customer information, privacy, just generally not talking.
saiya-jin 6y ago
The real world is ridiculously complex place, something about almost endless fractal. I too would like to see companies like FB burn because they gave us plenty of reasons in the past, but in this case... I look it from outdoor equipment perspective - if on my goretex jacket an YKK zipper fails, for me the jacket manufacturer (say Rab) would be the one to raise a warranty ticket/questions, not japanese YKK which produce billions of zippers for everybody all the time. Although Rab is just buying products from DuPont (sigh...), YKK, threads etc. and putting them together (at least that's a more common situation compared to manufacturing it yourself). I guess in real world Rab would swallow my specific issue while in warranty and issue a fix/replacement, and if they see enough issues with supplier they raise it in batch mode ie for discount for future or one-time compensation.
- munk-a 6y ago
  Well one potential outcome of a suit against YKK for a zipper failure might be that, in fact, the zipper itself didn't fail due to poor quality reasons - but instead the fabric shed and accumulated in the teeth wearing them down over time... Basically, with an assembled product, it's unreasonable to expect consumers to try and identify the actual fault of the design. As an anecdote on this topic.... I recall having a long necked jacket as a kid where the zipper wore down heavily around the collar since the neck was so long that it ended up being too tall for normal day-wear - and thus a lot of unnecessary stress was put on the zipper mechanism when it was partially zipped up. After a few months the teeth had weakened in that area to the point where the zipper would frequently come off the tracks there. In this specific case fitting a jacket with a four inch collar caused a zipper failure - the zipper was probably cheaply made anyways but if the cut of the jacket had been different there likely wouldn't have been an issue.

ArnoVW 6y ago

'luckily' it is expensive to sue, so everything works out. Consider the alternative: the laptop you bought on Amazon catches fire and burns down the school of your daughter. The school contacts your insurance, who now has to contact a component supplier in Shenzen (who supplied the power supply), and sue them under Chinese law, instead of Amazon.

munk-a 6y ago

I think that this can end up resulting in less bureaucratic churn then the other approach. In this particular case a bunch of users had their data forwarded by one entity - if CA had harvested data from multiple sources using the Facebook API then I think it'd be unreasonable for those users to need to legally pursue each terms violator - Facebook may also refuse to share the identity of the breach for a variety of reasons[1] making the lawsuit without an identified defendant which doesn't really help matters. 1. Proprietary customer information, privacy, just generally not talking.

saiya-jin 6y ago

The real world is ridiculously complex place, something about almost endless fractal. I too would like to see companies like FB burn because they gave us plenty of reasons in the past, but in this case... I look it from outdoor equipment perspective - if on my goretex jacket an YKK zipper fails, for me the jacket manufacturer (say Rab) would be the one to raise a warranty ticket/questions, not japanese YKK which produce billions of zippers for everybody all the time. Although Rab is just buying products from DuPont (sigh...), YKK, threads etc. and putting them together (at least that's a more common situation compared to manufacturing it yourself). I guess in real world Rab would swallow my specific issue while in warranty and issue a fix/replacement, and if they see enough issues with supplier they raise it in batch mode ie for discount for future or one-time compensation.

munk-a 6y ago
Well one potential outcome of a suit against YKK for a zipper failure might be that, in fact, the zipper itself didn't fail due to poor quality reasons - but instead the fabric shed and accumulated in the teeth wearing them down over time... Basically, with an assembled product, it's unreasonable to expect consumers to try and identify the actual fault of the design. As an anecdote on this topic.... I recall having a long necked jacket as a kid where the zipper wore down heavily around the collar since the neck was so long that it ended up being too tall for normal day-wear - and thus a lot of unnecessary stress was put on the zipper mechanism when it was partially zipped up. After a few months the teeth had weakened in that area to the point where the zipper would frequently come off the tracks there. In this specific case fitting a jacket with a four inch collar caused a zipper failure - the zipper was probably cheaply made anyways but if the cut of the jacket had been different there likely wouldn't have been an issue.