EU Officials Tell Sony and Apple to Fix User's Trust Issues

Pressure is growing on Apple and Sony with European governments demanding that they need to rebuild their user’s trust. The speech, covered by Reuters was made by the European Justice Union Commissioner Viviane Reding addressed a gathering in Brussels and spoke on Apple’s location tracking saga and the Sony PlayStation Network, as well as Sony Online Entertainment credit card information leaks.

Apple and Sony could face backlash from EU

In the speech, Reding said that the trust has to be reinstated now and those in charge have to take relevant technical and organizational measures to guarantee protection against data loss or an unjustified access.

This speech was issued just after Apple responded them tracking user’s locations and thereby denying the claim that they were not doing so and had no plans to do so.

More from News & Analysis

What is the US HIRE Bill and why is India’s $250-billion IT sector worried? Is the internet dead? What's this theory that OpenAI's Sam Altman says might be true?

The EU Commissioner of Justice pointed out Sony in particular regarding them notifying their user’s of the data breach. However, Reding stated that responding to this claim by Sony was too long and it should have happened sooner than a week.

Nick Caplin, a spokesman for Sony in Europe said that they were currently rebuilding the PlayStation Network to ensure enhanced security to protect its consumer’s data moving forward and they were doing everything we can to ensure this doesn’t happen again. Sony has also said that they had created a new chief security information officer position and plans to offer its customers free identity theft monitoring.

Viviane Reding further went on to say that a social network with more than 200 million users must stick to EU law even if it is based in the US and its data stored in a so called cloud.

For more information on the location tracking saga by Apple click here and for the Sony data breach, click here