A failure to honor money-back guarantees could be addressed by
standard contract law. And if customers wanted privacy enough they
could only buy such products that guarenteed privacy.
So the key here seems to be that you identified what you considered to
be a low quality product, which customers weren't treating as such.
You thought you knew better than them about the product quality, and
proceeded to make it difficult or impossible for them to buy that product.
This sort of situation is exactly the sort that I have focused on
modeling in my academic work on product bans. (See:
http://hss.caltech.edu/~hanson/whyban.ps) So I am interested to learn
more about your reasoning.
Did you consider the possibility of just warning customers that you
considered this product to be low quality? For example, you could
have printed a flyer which you required salespeople to give potential
customers prior to a sale. (A similar things happens with moving
companies now.) Did you consider just taxing the products you disliked?
Who exactly did you think would thank you for this work, and reward
you politically. Customers who would otherwise have bought the
product? Those who would have sold the product? Those who sold
competing products? Other concerned citizens?
Robin D. Hanson hanson@hss.caltech.edu http://hss.caltech.edu/~hanson/