Can EnfTech advance the detection of unsafe products on online platforms?
As online shopping has grown, consumers and protection authorities have faced a growing challenge of unsafe products being readily available online.
Professor Christine Riefa will be giving expert input into a European Parliament public hearing on consumer safety and online platforms.
The European Parliament’s Committee for the Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO) is hosting a public hearing on 17th February 2025 as it considers whether new measures are needed to improve product safety and customs control.
The discussion will help IMCO evaluate whether online products sold in the EU comply with EU safety laws and consider ways to ensure fair competition and effective enforcement.
New obligations for online platforms
Since the General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR) came into force in December 2024, online platforms obligations have been reshaped so that they are now an integral actor in the machinery for combatting the sale of unsafe non-food products online. So, although online platforms do not have an obligation of active monitoring, detection of unsafe products has now become an important requirement under the GPSR.
In addition, the Digital Services Act (DSA) puts additional obligations on the biggest platforms to curb the sale of unsafe products.
Enter Enforcement Technology?
One of the key challenges in combatting unsafe products on online platforms is the fact that sellers can sell from anywhere in the world, where safety standards may not be in line with EU standards.
In addition, whereas international commerce used to see big containers ships arrive at ports and could be checked by customs officer, the rise of drop shipping has led to large shipments of very small packages passing through borders which mostly go undetected.
Enforcement Technology is well suited to large scale monitoring tasks, by assisting both online platforms to detect unsafe products at the point of sale, and supporting enforcement authorities with a product safety portfolio.
EnfTech for product safety out in the field
The EnfTech report and EnfTech Catalogue identifies several tools already useful to combat unsafe products online:
Energy Safety Victoria in Australia uses AI to identify where electrical items are sold online via visual and text recognition. Once identified the seller is matched against a registry to check if they are authorised to sell the product to consumers.
The Alibaba group use a monitoring tool to tackle online counterfeiting and piracy. Counterfeit products are often unsafe and hence detection of one could curb the other. It uses fake product identification modelling, image recognition, semantic recognition and product information databases to identify products and real-time interception systems to serve take down notices. And it goes further - by tracing the movement of funds and finance, it can identify counterfeiters and the factories producing the goods.
Other innovations include companies developing individual digital identities for consumer products, enabling them to be part of 'product cloud' which organises the world’s ecosystem of product lifecycle data. An active digital identity is given to every product at serialised item, stock keeping unit or batch level. These are currently used to identify which branded products are genuine or counterfeit.
Online platforms using enforcement technology for unsafe products
Amazon’s website explains that it uses vetting controls that employ ‘advance technology and expert human reviewers to verify the identities of potential sellers’ and ensure the authenticity of the identity of sellers.
Their system analyses several data points to detect and prevent risks as well as monitor selling accounts for anomalies. Using advanced machine learning technology to search product listings and customer interactions, they look out for markers of abuse or safety concerns, and removes products where there is a concern or if they learn of a recall in their collaboration with manufacturers, brands, government agencies.
It recently put in place a new web page for recalls and product safety which enables buyers to access information on recalls giving links to relevant third-party websites to do so. Amazon has signed up to the European Commission’s Safety Pledge.
Consumer Protection Authorities using enforcement technology for unsafe products
Authorities can also use technology to detect products that had been notified as dangerous on the Safety Gate of the European Union but have reappeared online in other webshops or online marketplaces. Their Web Crawler launched in 2022 was designed to assist national authorities in automatically identifying listings of dangerous products online.
The European Commission has also announced that it plans to ramp up efforts to tackle the issue of unsafe products sold online with the adoption of AI tools for the detection of illegal goods and shared databases. This will include a new Web Crawler to be launched in 2025 to perform automated searches for potentially non-compliant products on online marketplaces.
According to the Commission, this should screen product offers and consumer reviews, using keywords indicating potential non-compliance, selected by market surveillance officers, and computing lists of potentially non-compliant products.
Potential to meet speed and scale of product safety monitoring
This, like many other EnfTech tools, has real potential to help streamline enforcement activities and help enforcers deliver their functions at the speed and scale required in this fast paced online shopping world. And it’s great to see a cross-border approach to tackling product safety.
Read the EnfTech Report for more analysis and examples of Enforcement Technology for Consumer Protection in action.