By Munsif Vengattil
BENGALURU, Sept 8 (Reuters) – EBay has launched an internal review of its shopping website’s safeguards after Reuters flagged that several gender-prediction kits were available for delivery to India, where using them is a criminal offence under a law meant to curb female foeticide.
After Reuters told eBay last week that nine listings on the platform showed gender-testing kits, including those made by brands such as SneakPeek and Peekaboo, being offered by third-party sellers for delivery in India, eBay removed these listings.
“These listings violated local regulations and eBay’s policies, and we are reviewing these controls, including the relevant shipping and checkout experience, to determine whether further enhancements are appropriate,” eBay told Reuters in a statement.
“EBay has controls in place intended to prevent certain gender-prediction products from being visible in India,” it added.
EBay, which has 136 million active buyers globally, is one of the world’s largest online marketplaces, where only third-party sellers list products. EBay does not have a local Indian shopping website but offers delivery to the country.
Platforms such as Amazon and eBay have previously come under scrutiny in India for listing restricted products, including banned wildlife items and e-cigarettes.
Amazon’s U.S. website, which ships many products internationally to India, does list gender-testing products but does not offer India delivery, a Reuters review found.
THE INDIAN LAW
India’s 1994 law on prenatal gender determination followed a sharp fall in the number of girls born for every 1,000 boys after the spread of ultrasound technology. Campaigners have said the technology let parents learn a foetus’s sex early enough to abort female foetuses rather than raise a daughter.
The preference for male children is rooted in patrilineal inheritance customs, the expectation that sons support parents in their old age and dowry demands made at weddings by the groom and his family despite a decades-old ban on the practice.
Violations of the prenatal gender determination law can attract up to three years in prison, with tougher penalties for repeat offences. India’s health ministry did not respond to requests for comment on Reuters findings.
Cybersecurity firm FalconFeeds first flagged the eBay listings to Reuters. The listings offered the gender-testing kits priced from $6.99 to $156.59 and with delivery to India.
One listing on eBay offered the Peekaboo kit, made by U.S.-based DNA Diagnostics Center, and marketed on the website as “get your baby’s gender at 6 weeks … accurate and easy to use”, with “FREE SHIPPING”.
DNA Diagnostics Center told Reuters in a statement it does not sell or distribute the kits for resale in India, adding it does not control the actions of independent third parties once a product has been purchased.
SneakPeek did not respond to a request for comment.
INDIA TARGETS GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS
In a sign of New Delhi’s growing concerns about such products, Peekaboo — though not officially sold in India — has separately been named in two August 9 Indian government notices sent to Google, seeking removal of search results that link to the company’s website.
The notices, reviewed by Reuters and sent by India’s health ministry, said Google’s India search engine provided “violative information” that led users to web pages “directly or indirectly promoting/advertising the gender prediction of an unborn child.”
Search engines can typically block specific website links from appearing in results for users in a given country.
In the notices, the ministry attached screenshots of three Google searches — “peekaboo test,” “buy peekaboo test online” and “boy or girl” — that linked to the Peekaboo website. It asked Google to discontinue the practice in line with Indian laws.
A Reuters check on Tuesday found the three searches returned results linking to the Peekaboo website.
Google and India’s health ministry did not respond to Reuters queries.
(Reporting by Munsif Vengattil in Bengaluru; Editing by Aditya Kalra and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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