alt Hacker News> It's just a self declaration.
Without registering every minute product variation with a testing certificate, how else would you handle this though? As much as I think regulators should be swinging the axe more than they do, from an engineering perspective it's impossible to actually do unless everything is locked down ISO 9001-style, especially for electronics and doubly so when software is in the mix.
Lying on a self-declaration should always be taken very seriously, but I feel like it often isn't. For example, if Amazon is found to have fake-CE marked good for sale after it's been reported to them, the penalties should make even their eyes water and have their responsible people shuffling nervously.
There's a limited amount you can do for Temu direct-shipped deathtraps (I suppose if you went to an tech-brained extreme, you could use the x-rays of packages at the border that they already do and have something like AI-based statistical recognition of known-bad products). But there's also not nothing you can do if you really cared. For example, you could imagine a registry of every single tested-bad product, photos of it, where it came from, known aliases, sightings in the wild and so on.
> And back then there was also this weird "China Export" logo
I am pretty sure that is a myth. It's just a sloppy, not-quite-to-spec logo. There is no China Export scheme. Maybe it was a sneaky deliberate way to avoid being hit with a "fake CE mark" charge but instead argue it's "no CE mark", but in either case it's not a legal product if the product needed a CE mark in the first place.
Not hammering down on that hard and fast is what allows that kind of thing. Recall the products you see with that and the retailers and importers would quickly get the message. Test products preemptively and publish the results. Allow it to fester and you get problems and people actually die.
You are right. There should be far far more quality checks.
There can be an enourmous difference between UL compliance and CE self declaration. No standard (normal?) business is actively trying to kill its customers, but there are a lot of small companies that love to make a profit by cutting a lot of corners.
That is one of the reasons these kinds of certifications exist in the first place and people should be able to rely on them. You cannot rely on CE and hope for the best.
Having certain UL certifications require rigirous and continuous testing in certified labs or environments. It makes things super expensive, but also very trustworthy. The fines, investigations and lawsuits are no joke. Not even for huge megacorporations. I've seen documentation where for instance General Electric had 48 hours to fix a problem or the product cannot ever be sold ever again, there would be a complete recall on their costs and the company could face banning from doing business completely.
I once had companies design power distribution units that required UL compliance. Price tag for a single unit was pretty insane. Around $400 per unit if i remember correctly. No consumer in their right mind would ever pay that if there is a market with a zillion cheap alternatives.
Even back then the market was flooded with fake CE crap. But it's also incredibly cheap, so lots of people (myself included for some things) buy the cheap stuff. They want the full experience, but don't want to (cannot?) pay top notch for it.
I get why. I get the process where everybody wants to make money. But it wil continue to demand lives, because there will always be people cutting corners if they somehow can and there will always be people who will buy the cheap stuff, because they want it.