Comment by brey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brey | Hacker News Reader

  Nest has stopped selling its smart smoke alarms after it discovered a flaw 
  which could prevent the timely detection of fire.

  the company is not aware of any customers who have experienced it

this is disingenuous. you would expect this feature (detect fire and save your life) to be used by a tiny, tiny percentage of customers. the fact that nobody's experienced the failure does not make this situation any better.

it's like selling a car with a broken airbag. "well, it's not caused me a problem, I don't see the issue ..."

(I'm not criticising Nest, they're doing the right thing. I'm saying it's bad journalism to throw that in the article as if that mitigates things)

How is this disingenuous? How else is the reporter supposed to explain that this issue has not been experienced by any customers?

In an ideal world, the same way the person you responded to did (hopefully via Nest themselves). "Nest is not aware of any customers affected by this flaw though they stress/admit that this is potentially due to the relative rarity of home fires."

Reminds me of this xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/937/

Here is the full "disingenuous" quote:

> Nest's own internal testing identified this problem and the company is not aware of any customers who have experienced it, "but the fact that it could even potentially happen is extremely important to me and I want to address it immediately."

Where did they imply that the situation is better because no one has experienced the failure??

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