Companies Might Soon Have to Tell You When Their Products Will Die
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Losing access to a device sucks. Whether it's a laptop still running Windows 10, a router that's been phased out by your internet provider, or an expensive AI gadget that has suddenly been bricked, it's a bummer to be permanently disconnected from a thing you paid money for. That's where a group of consumer advocates hope to help, by calling on US lawmakers to create policies that support connected products at the end of their lives.
Stacey Higginbotham, a Policy Fellow at Consumer Reports and former journalist who covered internet-of-things devices for more than a decade, has been through the dead device gauntlet more than a few times. She's used every weird, swiftly forgotten gadget since the Quirky Egg Minder—a smart egg carton that was meant to keep you appraised of how many eggs you had, but ultimately failed to capture a market. (Though you can still buy one if you really want to.) Turns out, lots of stuff has gone this route.
'I had hundreds—I'm not kidding, hundreds —of devices that have died over these decades,' Higginbotham says. 'I have lived through hundreds of poorly thought out, poorly executed IoT products that have come into the market, failed and then left a trail of e-waste and unhappy consumers behind them.'
Higginbotham helped put together a new joint report by the consumer advocacy groups Consumer Reports, US PIRG, and the nonprofit Secure Resilient Future Foundation. The report suggests language for potential legislation that it hopes will be picked up and championed by lawmakers at the state or federal level. The Connected Consumer Products End of Life Disclosure Act, as they call it, would require device manufacturers to indicate how long they plan to support the devices they sell, and give users fair warning when their devices are headed toward the end of their lifespan.
It's a problem that some consumers will be more familiar with than others. The US Federal Trade Commission, in response to a public letter put out by US PIRG, reviewed the websites of 184 products and found that 89 percent of them did not disclose how long the manufacturer intended to support its product.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, director of PIRG's Designed to Last campaign, says that legislation like this could affect more people than just the early adopters of out-there gadgets like the Quirky Egg Minder or the recently deceased Humane AI Pin. It would apply to people's phones, laptops, fitness trackers, fridges, stoves, printers, microwaves, cars—nearly every device in your house, office, and driveway that can (or probably will someday) connect to the internet.
'I mean, President Trump just said it,' Gutterman says, referencing the US leader's reaction to seeing the dashboard of a Tesla during a recent publicity stunt at the White House: ' 'Everything's computer.' That's true, it is all computer.'
When the online services that power a connected device go away, either because a company collapses or just stops supporting certain products, those devices can wind up bricked and broken. They can also remain mostly functional for years, even if the user doesn't realize that software support has ended. That means devices may no longer have access to regular security updates, which can make them vulnerable to cyberattacks or use as an insidious node in a wider botnet of zombie devices.
The proposed act would require companies to disclose a 'reasonable' support timeframe on a product's packaging and online where it is sold, letting users know how long they can expect a device to have access to those connected features. It would also require companies to notify customers when their devices are approaching the end of their support lifespans, and inform them of what features are going away.
Finally, there's the cybersecurity angle, which would require internet providers to remove and exchange company-provided broadband routers from consumer homes when they reach their end of life.
'The cybersecurity piece really coalesces around the requirement that internet service providers that lease or sell smart connected devices to their customers take responsibility for managing end-of-life devices on their networks,' says Paul Roberts, the president of the Secure Resilient Future Foundation (SRFF), an advocacy non-profit that focuses on cybersecurity.
If the router-specific thing feels a little out of left field, that's because Roberts says it is a deliberate two-pronged approach. 'Those are two somewhat distinct issues, but they're all part of the bigger problem,' Roberts says, 'which is putting some guardrails and definition around this smart-device marketplace. Saying to manufacturers, there are rules you need to abide by if you want to sell a smart connected product. It's not the wild west.'
Roberts hopes that if the law gets support from lawmakers, and is eventually turned into real legislation, it will create market incentives for companies looking to make more secure software products, similar to how seatbelts and airbags became widely accepted in motor vehicles.
However, it's less clear whether that legislation will ever get any traction at the federal level in the US in a political climate dominated by wanton, whirlwind deregulation. While the European Union has led the way on regulation about product repairability, and end-of-life treatment for vehicles and e-waste recycling, the US hasn't made similar moves.
'We are in a place where the FTC and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are not really going to do anything that's pro consumer,' says Anshel Sag, a principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategies. 'I don't see any real appetite for regulation.'
Sag also feels there's a possibility that such legislation has the potential to dampen the thirst for innovation that drives startups. If companies know they have to support a product for a set amount of time, it could limit the kind of risks they're willing to take.
'I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing,' Sag says. 'I just think there's a lot of startups out there that aren't willing to take on that risk. And I think, because of that, it could impede innovation in some ways.'
Higginbotham is far less worried about this. She points back to her vast collection of dead devices—what has amounted to a veritable pile of e-waste.
'I don't know if that really counts as innovation,' Higginbotham says. 'We need to recalibrate our default setting based on the last decade and a half of experience. Maybe you don't have to just throw a bunch of stuff out into the ether and see what sticks.'
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