Shouldn’t Consumers Know the End of Life Date of Connected Devices?

In the grocery store, we’re given the estimated date that the food we’re buying will turn, helping us to make more informed decisions about what we are purchasing and the quality therein. Wouldn’t it be nice if the same could be said about the technology our businesses rely on?

Well, moves are being made to establish this as the standard in tech as well.

An Industry Report Recommends New Legislation Pushing End-of-Life (EoL) Disclosure

The result of a joint effort between Consumer Reports, US Public Interest Research Group, and the Secure Resilient Future Foundation, the resulting report recommends legislation—referred to as The Connected Consumer Products End of Life Disclosure Act in the report—that would require manufacturers to inform consumers of their anticipated timelines concerning updates and when support will end. This is increasingly important as more and more devices are designed and manufactured with some connectivity inherent to their functionality.

When one of these devices loses the manufacturer’s support, there’s a litany of downsides that are quite suddenly introduced, with—as things currently stand—little to no warning to the consumer. For instance:

An Influx of E-Waste

Every connected device is, by definition, e-waste once it reaches the end of its useful life. As a result, more e-waste is produced than ever, much of it going unrecycled and rotting (or rather, decidedly not) in landfills. This is exacerbated by many of these devices lacking any utility without their connectivity… meaning that once the EoL is reached, the device more or less becomes a paperweight.

Insidious Security Concerns

Alternatively, unsupported devices can continue functioning long after the EoL date passes, lingering on a network without any additional security updates being developed and becoming more of a vulnerability the longer they are in use.

Consumer Frustration

It would be irksome if a device you had spent good money on suddenly stopped working. As things stand now, this is the reality for many connected devices. According to the US Federal Trade Commission, 89 percent of 184 total product websites offered no information regarding how long support would be provided.

The Suggested Law Would Help Fix This Through Consumer Transparency

By establishing regulations that would require any Internet-connected device to come with a timeframe for how long support would last, the idea is that the companies that create these products would be encouraged by the market to focus more on end-user security… while also being legally required to loop customers in to when a device’s end-of-life is coming and what features will be impacted.

Such regulation may also serve as a stopgap to prevent manufacturers from making devices “smart” for the sake of the marketing buzzword. After all, every device with such capabilities added would be another device they would have to maintain.

Regardless, every connected device must be seen as both a tool and a potential threat to your privacy and security and must be handled as such to minimize the damage they could do. KB Technologies is here to help you manage the IT you rely on in your business. Give us a call at (954) 834-2800 to learn more.