The Rise of Smart Vapes: Digital Games, Data Tracking, and Dangerous Addictions

Addiction Economy Thought for Today - introducing 'Smart Vapes' they have little digital games inbuilt and you can connect with your social media and have location tracking. Yes. Really. Clearly marketed at kids.

A single legal vape in the UK has 600 puffs and 20ml of nicotine, that's a pack of cigarettes. Because these are made bigger they can have up to 20-30,000 puffs, that's 1,000-1,500 cigarettes worth of nicotine and random chemical flavourings in one vape.

Let alone the data privacy, and uses to which location tracking can be put. Very very bad.

We are thinking about anticipatory regulation at the moment, to be fair to regulators in 2015 or so when that big clunky cigarette substitute vapes were being marketed to smokers you couldn't realistically think this would happen. Probably even disposables would be tough to anticipate and prohibit. What next?!

These are all illegal, so laws no good anyway. But they are so big, ugly and obvious, and with the electronics could be easily to track the shipments and hopefully the law in the UK will change and young people can have vapes confiscated. I don't know about the US where this was article was from.

There will be a plethora of vapes in all shapes, sizes and colours for all demographics - 'silver' vapers are a target we heard. The companies will try their best to create a new sector making vapes just another mainstream addiction like alcohol and gambling. We mustn't let them.

Thanks very much Maël MERTAH for the heads up.

hashtag#addiction hashtag#childprotection hashtag#vapes hashtag#smartvapes hashtag#dataprivacy

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