Recalled baby sleeper seats, counterfeit airbags, fake water filters, knockoff beauty products that cause people’s eyelashes to fall out, counterfeit cellphone chargers that can cause fires. Even shoddy children’s toys containing strong magnets that if ingested could require surgery to remove.
These and more unsafe products were discussed during a US House of Representatives hearing Wednesday that delved into fake products and fake reviews on major online stores and brought out representatives from Amazon, eBay and Apple.
During the nearly three-hour hearing, many lawmakers directed critical questions at Amazon’s representative, Dharmesh Mehta, vice president of worldwide customer trust and partner support. They raised concerns about how the world’s largest e-commerce company fights against knockoffs on its sites.
While Mehta said Amazon spent $500 million last year to fight fraud and abuse on its stores and uses a variety of tech tools to monitor millions of sellers and listings, some at the hearing weren’t impressed.
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“We need to call on all of these platforms to step up,” David Friedman, vice president of advocacy at Consumer Reports, told lawmakers. “They are investing effectively pennies when they should be investing dollars in informing consumers, getting these products off their platforms and putting their consumers instead of their profits first.”
The hearing was held just two days after a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a new bill, called the Shop Safe Act, that would make online retailers like Amazon and eBay legally liable for counterfeits sold on their sites. These companies right now generally avoid such liability for goods sold on their sites by other merchants. The gathering also follows investigations by The Wall Street Journal last year that detailed thousands of problematic product listings on Amazon’s site, including infant sleeping mats Amazon itself had banned for danger of suffocation and supplements that contained illegally imported prescription drugs.
The hearing comes at the same time that Washington is dialing up its scrutiny of tech giants, especially investigating potential monopolistic practices suffocating smaller competitors. Lawmakers have also held hearings over the past year and a half on Facebook’s controversial foray into cryptocurrency and Google’s collection of consumer data.
Source: CNET