EU questions Apple, Google and Microsoft about their scam prevention efforts

The European Union has queried Apple, Google and Microsoft on their efforts to prevent online scams. There is a fourth company under scrutiny.
Booking Holding, which is a Europe based company, and owns travel sites, is also being investigated.
So, this is not an antitrust thing. What’s it about this time? Well, the EU wants to ensure that users are protected against online scams, financial fraud, and other security risks that one might encounter online.
According to The Verge, a report by The Financial Times revealed that EU regulators are asking the companies to hand overt details about their methods to combat these threats, as part of the Digital Services Act. Microsoft Bing and Google Search will come under the scanner for fake search results. How about the quality of the results, huh? Or lack thereof?
The EU will evaluate how Apple and Google are handling fraud applications like fake banking apps on their app stores. Let’s see now, that shouldn’t be a problem. Oh, yes! Both the App Store and Play Store are free of fake apps and malware, right? They’re totally safe. How many times have we seen reports of malicious apps on both app marketplaces?
Apple’s walled-garden, which does not allow sideloading, which it claims helps keep its App Store highly secure, but this has been proven otherwise multiple times. Still, it is streets ahead of the Play Store. Google might claim that it is protecting Android users by requiring a valid certificate from developers who distribute their apps outside the Play Store. You know, that’s how sideloading is going to die. Given the nature of this scrutiny, that might be welcomed as a security move. Hopefully, antitrust officials will reject it. But that’s a drama for another time.
As for Booking, it has to share information on how it handled fake accommodation listings on its services.
If the companies security measures are found lacking, it could lead to official investigations, and it could result in a potential fine of up to 6% ofn their annual global turnover. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are hit by that fine, but even if they did it would be just another slap on the wrist.
EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen said, “We see that more and more criminal actions are taking place online. We have to make sure that online platforms really take all their efforts to detect and prevent that kind of illegal content.”
It’s kind of funny. Some Countries in the EU are messing around age-verification laws and such, where users have an option to upload their government-issued ID, credit card information, etc. You know what could happen if hackers breaches the system, and plant a backdoor in the system which is used to verify the IDs of people? It could result in online scams, identity theft, financial fraud. The very thing they’re scrutinizing.
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