Apple, Google should share apps’ origin, developer identity with government: House panel

From a little over 700,000 in In FY21, the volume of financial frauds ballooned to 20 million in FY23.

The Centre should mandate Apple and Google to share “exhaustive” metadata, developer identities and ownership as well as the origin of applications they host on their app stores to curb financial fraud, Parliament’s standing committee on finance, led by BJP’s Jayant Sinha, has said.

The panel said sharing such information with the government would empower regulators to conduct in-depth analysis, identify potential security vulnerabilities and institute appropriate measures to fortify the digital landscape, the Indian Express has reported.

Moneycontrol couldn’t verify the report independently.

According to the report, the committee also revealed that the Reserve Bank of India informed it that the big tech companies refused to make modifications to their operating systems to make the OTP-based two-factor authentication for banking services more secure.

According to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), more than 13 million cybersecurity incidents were tracked in 2022 alone, the committee said, adding noting that cyber crimes were mushrooming across the country.

Payment-related frauds were also on the rise. In FY21, the volume of financial frauds was a little over 700,000. In FY23, the volume has ballooned to 20 million.

The committee also took note of the cryptocurrency-related issues. “… in a recent act of terrorism, the main accused was found to have been funded through cryptocurrency. He received crypto currency in his wallet account with an Indian cryptocurrency exchange from multiple wallets held with a foreign cryptocurrency exchange.

“This implied that he did not buy any cryptocurrency. The cryptocurrency was transferred to his account from other accounts, and he merely sold it in the exchange and redeemed the money in his bank account and another mule account controlled by him,”  the committee cited the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) as saying.