> downloads and installs more crap as time goes on
That’s wild. Self replicating bloatware. How could this even be legislated against? I can’t figure out how to legally qualify something as “bloatware” vs something the user would want to automatically download/update.
With the amount of data this crapware collects, basic privacy regulations should do the job. Trojans and adware are already on the boundary between legal and illegal at best in many countries.
The problem is that nobody will go after the FWUWGFISA brand of phone on Amazon. They disappear next week and reappear as FUFWEIW. Either Amazon needs to get their crap together (I doubt that'll ever happen) or consumers need to make better purchasing decisions than "let's sort by price and pick the first one in the list".
Easy on that one too: make the seller partly responsible for the shit they sell. Amazon is profiting from the situation, so make them responsible as well.
That'd be ideal, but that would also end sites like eBay and other points of sale for second hand items for good. You could make an exception for second hand sales, but then every shady foreign reseller will just list their item as refurbished.
I don't think there's a good way to solve this problem without massively impacting businesses that do deserve the benefit of the doubt. The driving force behind this crap is consumers preferring the slightly cheaper Amazon rates despite all the news about scams. Perhaps some public education campaign about the problems with resellers can help, and maybe some legislation forcing platforms to show the branding of the actual seller instead of their own, but I don't think placing the responsibility directly on the platform is a good solution to this problem.
That’s wild. Self replicating bloatware. How could this even be legislated against? I can’t figure out how to legally qualify something as “bloatware” vs something the user would want to automatically download/update.