Chapter preview · Arc V — Paradise Lost
Chapter 19 — The Bill Comes Due
Externalities, societal responsibility, and product liability
The societal harms a connected product can produce beyond what product-liability law is built to catch – and the political process that turns each, in time, into mandatory regulation.
In 2022, BMW announced that owners of cars built with heated front-seat hardware could enable the feature by paying £15 a month. The hardware was already installed; the subscription unlocked a software gate. Customer reaction was loud and immediate; the program was shelved within months.
The case is small. The shape it points to is large. As connected products extend their reach beyond the device's physical boundaries, their adverse consequences extend with them. Many of the attack surfaces discussed in Chapter 18 arise along these vectors – across connectivity layers and into cloud infrastructure. The same expansion that enables continuous value delivery also opens pathways to broader societal harm.
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