Amazon failed to adequately warn more than 300,000 customers about serious risks, including death and electrocution, identified in U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) tests of more than 400,000 products sold by third parties on Amazon's platform.
The CPSC voted unanimously to hold Amazon legally liable for defective products from third-party sellers. Now Amazon must create a CPSC-approved plan to properly recall dangerous products, including highly flammable children's pajamas, defective carbon monoxide detectors and unsafe hair dryers that could cause electrocution. The CPSC fears these products are still widely used in homes across America.
While Amazon is hard at work coming up with a plan, the CPSC summarizes the ongoing risks to consumers:
Instead of recalling the products, which were sold between 2018 and 2021, Amazon sent notices to customers that the CPSC said “downplayed” the seriousness of the dangers.
In these messages — “despite compelling testing by the CPSC showing the products were dangerous” — Amazon only warned customers that the products “may not” meet federal safety standards and only posed “potential” risks such as “burns to children,” “electric shock,” or “exposure to potentially dangerous levels of carbon monoxide.”
Normally, a distributor would specifically have to use the word “recall” in the subject line of these types of messages, but Amazon avoided using that language entirely. Instead, Amazon opted to use much less alarming subject lines, such as “Attention: Important safety notice regarding your previous Amazon order” or “Important safety notice regarding your previous Amazon order.”
Amazon then left it up to customers to destroy the products and explicitly discouraged them from returning them. The e-commerce giant also gave each affected customer a gift card without requiring proof of destruction or providing sufficient public notice or informing customers of actual dangers, as may be required by law to ensure public safety.
In addition, Amazon's messages did not include photos of the defective products, as required by law, and did not provide a way for customers to respond. The commission found that Amazon made “no effort” to track how many items had been destroyed or even monitor the “number of messages that had been opened.”
Amazon still believes the posts were appropriate remedies. An Amazon spokesperson told Ars that Amazon plans to appeal the ruling.
“We are disappointed with the CPSC's decision,” the Amazon spokesperson said. “We plan to appeal the decision and look forward to taking our case to court. When we were first notified by the CPSC three years ago of potential safety issues with a small number of third-party products at the center of this lawsuit, we quickly notified customers, instructed them to stop using the products, and refunded their money.”
Amazon's 'evasive' security obligations
The CPSC has additional concerns about Amazon’s “inadequate” remedies. In particular, the CPSC is concerned that anyone who received the products as a gift or purchased them on the secondary market likely was not informed of the serious known dangers. The CPSC found that Amazon resold defective hair dryers and carbon monoxide detectors, demonstrating that secondary markets exist for these products.
“Amazon made no direct attempt to reach consumers who obtained the dangerous products as gifts, secondhand, donations, or on the secondary market,” the CPSC said.
