Prohibited health claims and false or misleading promises, as well as the sale of dangerous or unapproved products, pose safety risks for consumers in Austria.These risks are particularly challenging in online trade and are currently insufficiently addressed for products sold online. The eMarketShield project aims to improve the safety of consumers in online commerce. The focus lies on dietary supplements and products subject to the Food Safety and Consumer Protection Act (LMSVG). The results are intended to contribute to market surveillance for all product categories sold online.
The eMarketShield project is designed to develop and evaluate risk-based control approaches tailored to the requirements of online market surveillance, using data-driven decision-making. The project builds on proven approaches to risk-based control in physical retail. For selected use cases in the field of dietary supplements, proprietary approaches are implemented and compared with existing solutions. Alongside crawling (capturing the structure and content of a website), scraping (extracting text), and API accesses (interfaces between different systems), cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) methods, such as large language models (which understand natural language), are employed. Furthermore, special attention is given to promoting Austria's digital sovereignty by ensuring the development and implementation of these technologies and control approaches take place in a national context.
The findings of this project serve to identify potential weaknesses in online market surveillance and provide solutions for optimizing and improving the efficiency of the process. These insights form the basis for the targeted selection of specific data sources and the development of strategies for crawling and scraping, enabling effective market surveillance and minimizing potential risks for consumers.
Project Lead
Priv.-Doz. DI Dr. Christoph Rinner,
Österreichische Agentur für Gesundheit und Ernährungssicherheit GmbH (AGES)
Partners
Bundesministerium für Soziales, Gesundheit, Pflege und Konsumentenschutz (BMSGPK)
FH OÖ Forschungs und Entwicklungs GmbH
LIqua Linzer Institut für qualitative Analysen
Österreichisches Institut für angewandte Telekommunikation (ÖIAT)
X-Net Services GmbH
Xylem Science and Technology Management GmbH
Contact
Priv.-Doz. DI Dr. Christoph Rinner
Spargelfeldstraße 191, 1220 Wien
