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Since they're all mandated now, no one bothers. And when they weren't, people indeed chose cars without them. But those are a different issue; those are safety, and what we're talking about with IoT devices is security. Think door locks and immobilizers, not airbags and seat belts.
I think it’s a distinction without much of a difference. Security in IOT is safety from crime and hacking and so on. The point being that because of the fact that people learned about those features and why they were important, people did due diligence on making sure that those features were in the cars they bought. Sure some poorer people had to do without airbags in the early 1990s, but that was a cost issue.
I still think that it’s better to educate and demand due filling simply because the law moves much too slowly to keep up with technology and even then people making the rules often have no idea what the dangers are or how the things being regulated actually work. Having an octogenarian who has trouble with emails try to anticipate the issues of an IOT camera in your kids bedroom isn’t going to work well. Teaching parents to make sure their devices have strong password protection, good encryption, and virus protection is easier and would keep up with the field.
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I also suspect that even someone who intentionally chose a car based on it having airbags and seatbelts would be incompetent at deciding which cars had better airbags and seatbelts and which cars had worse airbags and seatbelts.
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