The company has now chosen to suspend its app regarding due to the problems and is managing the aftermath.
LifeLock, a giant in the identity theft industry, has now suspended its app following the massive mobile security issues that had plagued it, in order to give the company the chance to try to deal with some of the fallout from this devastating blow.
The company’s stock also took quite a beating when analysts downgraded it to “neutral” from “buy”.
The target share price had reached the point that it was slashed in half, by the time this article was written. The Tempe-based company’s stock price has been riding a virtual roller coaster and it doesn’t look as though it will be slowing down quite yet. This was all in response to the announcement that as a mobile security precaution, all of the user information from the LifeLock Wallet would be deleted, and the app would be taken down from Google Play, Amazon Apps, and other application stores.
Officials from LifeLock have revealed that the primary mobile security concern was over compliance.
They have stated that this is not a response to a cyberattack, but instead it is a precaution because they have discovered that their own application is not in compliance with the standards for credit card security. They explained that the
y were working on correcting the problem as quickly as they could, which makes it apparent that the removal of the application was done only as a temporary measure and they are hoping to provide a new one in the future.
Officials underscored the point that no personal information for any of their users had been compromised in any of these events.
According to the LifeLock vice president of corporate communications, “We’re still in the fact-finding period.” He went on to add that “We are limited in what we can share right now.” That said, he did explain that the issue with compliance was found internally and that the company voluntarily came forward to the Federal Trade Commission in order to report it.
They are now working on improving their mobile security in order to ensure that it complies with the Payment Card Industry standards for the protection of personal information.
The activities of applications from Google, Apple, and even Amazon are being examined.
American technology giants Google, Apple, and Amazon, as well as Gameloft, a game developer from France, are all being investigated by Italy for having allegedly participated in unfair commercial practices with respect to their mobile app marketplaces.
The allegation was made by the Italian antitrust and competition authority.
Now, the investigation into the practices is going to determine whether or not those four companies should be deemed to be misleading to customers when mobile app downloads are labeled as being free. This is specific to the applications that are marked as being free but which then require a player to have to pay a fee in order to be able to continue to use the apps beyond a certain point in the game or to unlock certain additional features.
The Italian authority feels that a free mobile app should never require a consumer to have to pay.
The antitrust watchdog released a statement that said that “Consumers could wrongly believe that the game is entirely free and, in any case, that they would know in advance the full costs of the game.” They added that “insufficient information seems to be provided to consumers about the settings needed to stop or limit the purchases within the app.”
Apple did not release a comment by the time of the writing of this article, but Gameloft issued a statement that it was conducting its own investigation into this issue, but had no comment beyond that. Neither Amazon nor Google could be immediately reached in order to obtain their response to this accusation.
An authority spokesperson explained that this investigation would likely take between seven and eight months to conduct and that if the companies are found to be guilty of the allegations, then the minimum fee that would be imposed on each would be €8.63 million.
This specific mobile app practice investigation follows closely on the heels of a previous one that was conducted by the European Commission earlier in 2014 which required companies to revise their rules for applications that can be downloaded for free but which then later require customers to pay for use.
