this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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It could have, if they had bothered to actually implement that check.
The company exists for reasons of short term profits though, so... why should/would they?
Should they have to implement that check? If you use a service improperly it's not surprising that you'd get incorrect results. Now maybe they had an inconclusivity parameter that they hid because they didn't want to have to give refunds to those customers, in which case that would be a problem.
"Have to" depends on factors like whether there are any laws being violated - e.g. for fraud, which would normally be difficult to prove but this kind of story might open up to an enormous lawsuit, regarding who has the responsibility of providing the services in return for the money, so despite offering a refund if the company had not done that in advance, but instead waited for the lawsuit, then it could get into deeper territory like what the specific language of the contract says, and what damages may be able to be demonstrated, etc.
And the laws there differ for a for-profit corporation iirc compared to a nonprofit organization that can still pay a hefty salary to its workers and management (I think?).
And then there's just public perception: people hearing about these scenarios could put the entire company, if not the industry itself, in severe financial jeopardy.
Especially if that check could have been implemented in a month or two, the cost of failing to do so may be extremely high in comparison to simply just doing it - as in, better safe than sorry.
But "have to", I don't know exactly. It just seems naively like something that would have been worthwhile? Maybe.
By have to I just meant to meet my expectations as a consumer. I couldn't care less if a service can't do something it wasn't designed or expected to do. If it identifies dogs correctly and acts randomly on humans, I don't care. If this is exposing a deeper flaw in its primary function of identifying dogs, such as asserting non conclusive results as conclusive, then I do care.
Then in that case it is subjective to whatever YOUR desires are... and I cannot help you by telling you what those are:-). Though at a guess, you sound like you would be more permissive towards it - like especially if you got a refund when you asked for one then all is good for you.
But there is an argument to be made that a company that is this negligent in checking whether the sample was contaminated in any way before sending out the results is arguably not one that you want to use? Even if it was the only company in existence that offered that service - at what point is bad information, i.e. unreliable & untrustworthy, worse than no information at all?
Though again, that gets back to it being a subjective determination. Which if not pertaining directly to you, needs to be applied to the customer population at large. Likely many of them would want some measure of reliability in the results, which is a pressure towards them "having to", in order to stay in business - i.e. even if you would offer them your own business, they need a sufficient amount overall to remain viable.
Ofc, you cannot truly know the answers to your questions, without deeper testing. I am just saying that based on the evidence put forth so far, it is not looking good. Especially if the industry overall is entirely unregulated. You could send them the same sample three times and get back a different dog each time? Or not... but then depending on the breed, some are more trustworthy than others? Or they could detect a lot of business from one customer, and start doing higher QA checks on only those samples, at the expense of all the others.
The true answer is that none of this is really known, and they can do whatever they can get away with - at which point the fact that they have already been caught, when such a simple & basic test could have easily prevented it, does not bode well for the other issues that remain unknown. The prior has shifted.