Top tech firms apple and google are taking down the app from their respective play stores which are giving mis information about Coronavirus. App store is banning the apps if they aren’t affiliated with a medical organization.
As per CNBC report google is not showing any results if you search for keyword coronavirus on Google playstore. This steps were taken in order to take down apps which are giving misinformation about corona virus.
As per the Verge New iOS apps related to the virus are appearing in search results or in top app rankings, CNBC reports, although there are existing and mostly benign options available. Those include a “virus tracker” app from a company called Healthlynked, a COVID-19 (the illness caused by the novel coronavirus) app from medical resource company Unbound, and a Portuguese-language app published by the Brazilian government with information about the virus.
As for Android, Google appears to be deliberately blocking search results for the virus and COVID-19, yet we don’t know if the company has an outright ban on new apps related to the coronavirus. Google does, as CNBC points out, have existing policies against apps that deny the existence of “major tragic effects”; apps that “lack reasonable sensitivity towards or capitalize on a natural disaster, atrocity, conflict, death, or other tragic event[s]”; and apps that appear to “profit from a tragic event with no discernible benefit to the victims.”
Apple and Google are far from the only companies taking measures to cut down on content that either peddles misinformation or seeks to take exploit the ongoing outbreak for financial gain. Facebook, the company’s Instagram subsidiary, and Twitter have instituted bans on coronavirus misinformation, and Amazon is currently grappling with waves of new product listings that are exploiting the situation by either claiming to provide cures or protection against COVID-19 or price gouging health items like hand sanitizer and face masks.
Etsy has begun cracking down on coronavirus listings on its marketplace, and Google has followed Facebook in banning coronavirus-related ads, although offenders are still slipping through the cracks.
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