I’m looking for a 2 port HDMI switch. I’m looking at the KVM HDMI switches on newegg.com and all the ones I looked at have a Proposition 65 Warning which states:
WARNING: This product can expose you to chemicals including one or more listed chemicals which are known to the State of California to cause cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm. For more information, go to www.P65Warnings.ca.gov
Here is one of the products I’m looking at which has this warning:
I’m totally confused by this. What chemical are they referring to? Why would any US company sell a product which has to have this sort of warning?
It’s a California thing. The product is not hazardous. CA Proposition 65 requires a warning whenever specifically defined chemicals are present, but doesn’t specify an exposure level. There is liability for omitting it, but there is no penalty for unnecessarily including it. Manufacturers thus add the warning as an ass-covering measure regardless of actual risk.
The chemical the manufacturer probably has in mind is the lead solder on the electronics, encased in the device.
I wouldn’t worry about it. Every single parking garage in CA has the same warning because of car exhaust, which you can’t avoid even if you never use parking garages. I’m not against regulations but this is truly overboard.
Prop 65 is the poster child for why law-making by referendum is a bad idea.
Prop 65 also has a “private prosecution” clause: Any California resident can sue a company for statutory damages even if the resident has suffered no personal damages. After Prop 65 passed, a whole bunch of law firms went into the “bounty hunter” business, suing businesses right and left for failure to post Prop 65 warning signs. This means Prop 65 warnings are ubiquitous in California and just kind of blend into the background noise.
As others have said: this warning is attached in some way to seemingly every man-made object, structure or material in California. Including, for example, coffee. Because brewing coffee produces extremely small amounts of chemicals which are, technically, carcinogenic.
Just ignore it and keep this in mind the next time you get into an argument about government regulation.
We have similar warnings round here about asbestos … that is, obviously asbestos is a dangerous substance that you have to be very careful of, but the warnings don’t actually provide any useful information whatsoever.
There is a “this structure may contain asbestos” warning on my youngest’s school right now, which I understand from the office staff means “well, we have no particular knowledge of where the asbestos might be, but the school was build before 1970, so…”
If the warning was on every electronic product that newegg.com was selling, we might be able to determine the pattern, for example saying it has copper wire in it, but I looked at a computer monitor and laptop, and don’t see the warnings there. So it isn’t all electronic devices. It is puzzling, what is so different in a KVM HDMI switch that someone decided it needs one? Yet there is no information about it.
If I own a company producing a product for consumer sale, I’d work to make sure our product was compliant so it didn’t need that warning.
I’m not a hardware guy, but I can’t think of what could be in a KVM HDMI switch that isn’t also in a computer monitor or laptop.
Three-Year Warranty and Environmentally Responsible Design
For peace of mind, the B032-HUA2 comes backed by a three-year warranty and is manufactured in compliance with strict RoHS specifications, reflecting Tripp Lite’s commitment to environmental responsibility.
I’d be willing to bet that it doesn’t actually comply with Prop 65.
Any device which is not ROHS-complaint will automatically not be Prop 65 complaint, but just being ROHS doesn’t mean you pass Prop 65. For example, Carbon Black is on the Prop 65 list, but not on ROHS. And Carbon Black is ubiquitous.
Perhaps there’s another criteria in the manufacturing. I don’t know, but the Tripp Lite one I just posted about is RoHS compliant and that might also satisfy the www.P65Warnings.ca.gov.
We might never know, because they don’t provide specific information or how the decision was made for the warning on the IOGEAR and not on that specific Tripp Lite product.
I guess we are to take a leap of faith, that those without the warning are deemed safer than those that have a warning.
I’m just buying one KVM HDMI switch for me to use. If I were involved with buying them for a an entire county’s school system, I’d think that someone would put that requirement in the RFP before it goes out to bid.
It’s worth reiterating that there’s no penalty at all for putting the warning on when it’s not needed. Even if your product has nothing at all in it that would or could be on the Prop65 list, it won’t hurt to put the warning on. And if you make a large number of products, it’s probably easier to put the warning on everything than it is to go through and figure out which items actually need it. The only drawback would be consumer reaction, but the warnings have gotten to be so ubiquitous that everyone ignores them anyway.
A much better approach would be if manufacturers could put on a sticker that says “This product is known to the state of California to not cause cancer”, and provide penalties for putting that sticker on things that don’t actually comply with the standards. Then, companies could decide if it’s worth it to go through the certification to use the sticker, and since most products wouldn’t have the sticker, its presence would actually mean something.
