Companies in every industry are trying to improve quality, so they'd love to track the performance of their products, based on which factory or which production line manufactured them. So companies will surely keep pressing to overcome any obstacles. It's already fairly far along. Well, the lawyers can sort that out in due time. Companies can probably find ways to pay customers for giving up information or to penalize them for, for instance, hiding the maintenance history of a car.
Companies can always provide guarantees.
Johnson Controls, for instance, has a test program under which it pays a commercial customer dearly if it says an air-conditioning chiller is about to go bad, and it's wrong. In addition, killer apps like these sensors have a way of creating powerful, unintended benefits that overcome early problems. For instance, with sensors now going into so many tractors and linking farmers to the Global Positioning System to minimize maintenance, Case's Advanced Farming Systems thinks it can help farmers improve yields. Case is using the GPS to map how farmers' yields vary widely throughout their fields. Case then prescribes optimal fertilizer levels, row by row.