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.

  • @HessiaNerd
    link
    241 month ago

    What really drove this home for me was when I was looking for nite-lights for my kids bedroom. We had kinda a woodsy theme so I found some cute mushroom looking ones. Reading the reviews for some of them they would break off and expose the wall 110VAC as bare contacts.

    There were dozens of variants and the new ones didn’t have the warnings, but you could tell they would fail just the same (literally just different colors).

    Also this

    https://hackaday.com/2020/02/26/be-wary-of-radioactive-bracelets-and-similar/