U.S. – CPSC Saferproducts.gov Database: Request for Comment and Public Hearing

Vol. 1057 | 19 Feb 2019

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is considering improvements to www.SaferProducts.gov, the organization’s publicly available consumer product safety information database, to make the portal easier to understand, navigate, and interact with, as well as more useful for submitting and obtaining desired information.

The CPSC is particularly interested in information to make the website more user-friendly, and possible modifications to make the searching, reporting, and commenting tools more useful.

In particular, the CPSC seeks comments on the following topics:

1. How to improve the overall design of SaferProducts.gov
2. Suggestions to make the user experience better when visiting SaferProducts.gov using a mobile device
3. Information about any problems that consumer or industry encountered when using SaferProducts.gov
4. Improving the process of reporting on SaferProducts.gov
5. Improving the instructions for submitting a report
6. For Business users: suggestions to improve the processes of registering, accessing, and responding to reports of products or other substances the Commission regulates on SaferProducts.gov
7. Improving the search function for the recalls and reports on the website
8. Inclusion of additional information to publish or provide with the recall and incident report data
9. Information regarding difficulty, if any, encountered while attempting to upload photos or videos with a report
10. Whether to create a data visualization tool (a tool to help people understand data by placing it in a visual context) to help consumers and businesses better understand the data captured through SaferProducts.gov
11. Whether to move to a pre-checked box where permission to publish is granted by the submitter automatically unless the submitter explicitly opts out by checking a box, as this could increase the number of published reports, increasing the awareness of potentially unsafe products
12. Ways the CPSC can motivate the provision of safety-related feedback to SaferProducts.gov as a primary, or at least additional, mechanism for capturing information on consumer product-related incidents for online retail sales where consumers can provide product rating or other feedback
13. Ways the agency can encourage the use of SaferProducts.gov among eligible reporters other than consumers, such as physicians, medical examiners, and first responders

The public hearing will begin at 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST) on March 6, 2019.

CPSC will accept written comments through April 3, 2019.

Federal Register notice announcing the public hearing as well as requesting public comments can be reviewed at: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-02-11/pdf/2019-01817.pdf

For questions, please contact Laxmi Ravikumar (laxmi.ravikumar@intertek.com, +1-630-209-9265) or Pratik Ichhaporia (pratik.ichhaporia@intertek.com, +1-847-212-8273).