Him: Should I, um, press the button?
Her: Nope. You’ve got zero bars of service.
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Is “Come back in a few days; maybe a week if I’m not a Prime member” really ‘on-message’ in that context?
I’m actually a trifle surprised that this hasn’t degenerated into litigation yet: Call me a naive believer in the spirit of the law; but a “engage in fraud by impersonation in a way that immediately causes the impersonated target to be charged; and Amazon to ship product” button specifically designed to be so trivial to use and visually appealing that even a preliterate toddler can use it(if mounted low enough), and without any sort of labeling that would allow someone unfamiliar with tech blogs or Amazon advertising to know that that’s even what the button does; strikes me as the sort of thing that the “Contracts involve a meeting of minds between the contracting parties” optimists would have been incapable of imagining even if they were attempting biting satire. Aw well. Progress grinds on.
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Progress grinds on!
Someday, a day I will extend my life to reach, there will be fast, efficient drone delivery available and I will be newly invited into the home of a new acquaintance or somesuch. They will be someone who became enamoured of Dash, and the buttons will be dozens, even hundreds, and I will press them all, many times, and we will die in the fire of a thousand drones crashing down on us.
Is it fair to dream, is it wrong to hope, is it too much to ask?
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Well, pushing someone’s Dash button without their knowledge or permission is a dick move, but I’d call the buttons an attractive nuisance. Plus, anyone who has one of the buttons plans on ordering the product and only one unit is sent even for multiple pushes, so all that’s happening is a single unit of the product is being sent early.
As I understand it, there’s a confirmation message that pops up on your phone or e-mail, so that would cut down on a lot of people being caught unawares by a new shipment of detergent or condoms or whatever.
From the legal end, I think it would be safe for Amazon even if there weren’t other safeguards. Even in the worst case scenario (massive class-action suit that somehow escaped binding arbitration), Amazon could make a pretty strong case that the button-owners clearly understood what they were getting into when they decided to shop by button. The act of volition isn’t pressing the button, it’s jumping through hoops just so you’ll have a button to press. At that point you’re accepting at least some if not all responsibility for button-pressings happening.
Even the medieval folks who gave us what turned into the common law would be able to understand a contract that said “Here be a red flag bearing my sigil, and if this flag be hung from the door of thy hovel, I shall deliver unto thee a cart of ox-manure on the morrow, and thou shalt pay me a groat.” It’s not if you specifically deliberately hang the flag, it’s whether you allow it to be hung.
All that having been said, yeah, these things are dumb.
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Then it’s a good thing that we have all these condoms!
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I’m just thinking if there’s one thing kids do not want to stumble across it’s finding their parents’ Amazon Dash condom button. 
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In testing the antennae proved rather uncomfortable
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I saw Daesh buttons on Alibaba, but gave them a pass.
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Didn’t Apple get wrist-slapped and forced to make some UI changes over the rather similar structure of ‘in-app purchases so easy an idiot child can make them’ problems?
I don’t think that anyone has ever argued for an ‘all contractual signalling mechanisms shall be secured unto the utmost’ standard(just ask the Payment Card industry about that little joke…); but ‘so easy an idiot child could do it without even knowing what ‘it’ is’ is arguably an even lower standard than ‘pitifully riddled with known weaknesses to fraud’.
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