Building Trust at OLX Group
Guiding principles that aim to ensure everyone is safe and welcome to trade
Successful consumer marketplaces depend on trust. At OLX Group, we aspire to shape the future of trade, and it is our responsibility to ensure that the content on our platforms and the items and services being offered are legal, safe, and inclusive – where everyone feels welcome to trade.
We harness the best of technology, coupled with human intervention and cultural empathy to build the systems and processes that connect tens of millions of people every month on our platforms.
Trust = Policy + Technology + People
Policy
Our policies and terms of service are unique for each of our platforms, and are designed to be relevant for each local geography. However, all of our platforms share a unifying set of guiding principles to maintain alignment across our many brands operating across multiple countries.
OLX Group Guiding Principles prohibit trade and content that either (1) breaks local law or (2) erodes trust in the marketplace, is deliberately harmful to our users, or makes specific populations feel unwelcome.
Technology
Enforcement of our policies and preventing unwelcome content begins with technologies that are built into our platforms that utilise ever-improving machine learning models that identify and take action on non compliant content in real time.
On some of our platforms, more than 90% of items are rejected or approved using technical automation and intelligence. Our technologies identify hundreds of thousands of items every day that are automatically rejected and blocked from being exposed to our buyers, helping keep our customers safe.
People
When the automated technical review of an item results in uncertainty, those items get flagged for manual review by a trained person who makes their own judgment call about whether to accept or reject an item for sale, based on our stated policies.
Even with proactive policy, ever-improving technology, and human judgement with content moderators who look for suspicious content, sometimes inappropriate content still sneaks through. When this happens, our community of users are enabled to flag such instances, which helps us prioritise, review, and remove violations to keep our users safer.
An holistic approach to trust & safety
Across our platforms we strive to ensure trust and safety is baked into the user experience throughout the user journey. We look for every opportunity to help our users keep themselves safe with features like trusted seller badges, reviews, safe chat and recommendations on how to trade safely.
Trust in our marketplaces is essential, and a priority for all our businesses. We are constantly evolving and improving, and recognise the work is never done to further build and earn trust, from and between, our users.
The OLX Group Guiding Principles
OLX Group is united globally to prohibit trade and content that either (1) breaks local law or (2) erodes trust in the marketplace, is deliberately harmful to our users, or makes specific populations feel unwelcome.
1. We respect local law:
Culture, history and governments have produced different laws governing what is considered permissible expression.
Examples:
Outright illegal (in itself)
Illegal drugs, prostitution, counterfeit goods, content related to certain groups or historical organisations, specific laws relating to animals / wildlife trafficking
Legal regulation in who can buy or sell
Weapons, pharmaceutical medications, alcohol, tobacco, chemicals, vaccines, financial services
2. We defend globally shared principles:
We build safe and trustworthy places to trade where no one is deliberately made to feel unwelcome. Potentially harmful and hateful content offers the opportunity for that trust to be broken. Such content is not allowed.
Examples:
- Scam, spam and deceptive practices (erodes trust / harms others)
Personal data, private accounts, malicious software, fake listings, ponzi schemes - Sexually explicit content (erodes trust / makes people feel unwelcome)
Nudity, strip tease, sensual massage, sex toys - Hateful content (harms others / makes people feel unwelcome)
Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic content, jobs listings that proactively discriminate - Potentially harmful substances (erodes trust / harms others)
Synthetic drugs, vape, chemicals.
Our Partners
We build proactive relations with key stakeholders who share our interest in marketplace safety.
- Striving to support Governments in protecting consumers, such as being proactive toward DSA compliance
- Having an open dialogue with Brands owners about how to protect their intellectual property.
- Connecting with Law Enforcement, following guidelines, and even building automated systems to report potential criminal activity.
- Supporting NGOs across important global topics.
Additional Policies
We have developed policies on specific topics including:
- Counterfeit goods
- Animal welfare
- Covid19
- Human Rights.