At first it seems to make sense to remove these products. After all, businesses could suffer adverse effects from a safe product continiung to be included on a website intended to show products identified as unsafe. However, Recalled Products is just as much a register of safe products as unsafe. We believe that keeping information about safe products in circulation is as important as for unsafe products. Why?

Up-to-date representation reduces confusion over a product’s current status. Consumers cannot be sure of a product’s status if it is eliminated from the Recalled Products site (and by logical extension from all and any sites carrying recall information). Thus we prefer to update the product entry with an appropriate message in order to provide a clear and current service. One of the first items you’ll see on such pages is a box-out clearly stating that a product is removed along with RAPEX’s stated reason for removal.

We believe that responsible businesses should welcome this approach as it shows that the product is no longer considered a risk and can be used safely. A quick internet search reveals websites that continue to list products as recalled long after their reclassification as safe. We believe that it is actually beneficial to companies that the Recalled Products website gives the correct status of the product.

To be fair, in all the dealings we’ve had with such companies to date, this policy has been accepted once pointed out. Our definitive policy can be seen on the recalled products website.

It seems like a while since the heady days of June 2010 when the website fell over following unexpected mainstream media coverage on version 1 launch day. Since then we’ve racked up a substantial 28,000+ registrants and the site continues to draw praise for its simple and free solution to a problem experienced by people of all ages, backgrounds and denominations.

We’ve purposely opted for a very quiet release in this instance to allow for snagging and rectifying the inevitable teething problems. We will be publicising the site modestly in February but in the meantime, here’s some background on the new features in version 2.

New opt-out services added

In line with our aim to increase the range of opt-out services covered by StayPrivate.org, we’ve added in the ability to register with the Direct Marketing Association’s Corporate Telephone Preference (CTPS) and Fax Preference (FPS) services.

Support for business registrants

Since the CTPS is business-specific and is unavailable to home registrants, it made sense to separate registration into distinct residential and business types. Residential registrants are given access to the Mail (MPS), Telephone (TPS), Baby Mail (BMPS) and FPS services whilst business registrants can access the CTPS and FPS services. Following account creation, indication is given in the dashboard section as to which type of account a user holds.

Delegated registrations

Feedback indicated that a significant number of users wished to register on behalf of a family member or friend lacking internet access and/or an email address. In response to this, we altered the account management area to allow multiple homes to be registered from a single email address. Accordingly, we’ve also provided the ability to manage each set of address details from the account dashboard.

Improvements to help and guidance

We receive a large number of queries requesting assistance on a range of issues from basic usability queries to concerns over the nature of marketing communications received by our users post sign-up. As a team of two that doesn’t work in this area exclusively, fielding these queries, let alone responding in detail to each one, is a massive task. We therefore place great importance in the quality and simplicity of the guidance information we provide and this has been edited, added to and repositioned to improve clarity, to provide as much assistance as possible and to reduce repetition.

Improving this information is not a science – rather it involves simple analysis of the queries received and a common sense approach to answering them. Ensuring that all issues are covered, keeping language as simple and free of jargon as possible, making appropriate information easier to locate by grouping and indexing questions, signposting where assistance is out of scope and stating clearly what CF Labs/StayPrivate.org can and cannot do are the basic yet fundamental tenets we have strived to observe. Along with instructing users to read the FAQ as the first step on our help page, of course…

Visual design

We’ve freshened up the design as well as made some necessary changes to accommodate elements introduced in version 2. There are now two sign up buttons to cater for the addition of business registrations to our original residential service. We’ve added big bold icons to the homepage to draw attention to information on the main aspects of the service. We’ve also included a visual map of the registration journey on our ‘About’ page to illustrate the process in a comprehensive way and further eliminate any confusion as to how the service operates.

Background improvements

On the back end, we’ve built a comprehensive admin system that allows us to do more things faster and more easily, from manipulating registration throughput levels to quickly updating service status messages. We’ve also added SSL security to the site, making StayPrivate.org even more private!

Feedback

As always, we appreciate any feedback you have. Either leave a comment here, or email feedback [at] stayprivate.org.

We will be upgrading and testing the StayPrivate.org website on Tuesday 25th January. The site may be temporarily unavailable while the work is carried out, although we will endeavour to keep interruptions to an absolute minimum. We apologise in advance for any inconvenience this may cause.

More Detail

We will be testing the throughput of new opt-out services prior to roll out as well as bug checking following significant changes made to the backend and the user account system.

Updates

As ever, we’ll be posting updates during the work through the @cflabs twitter account.

Consumer Focus including CF Labs is committed to maintaining a business-as-usual approach for the remainder of its existence. The welfare of consumers rightly transcends the identity of the body charged with its responsibility, particularly in the current economic climate.

This does however mean that the future of projects developed by CF Labs such as StayPrivate.org and RecalledProducts.org is uncertain in the medium to long term.

StayPrivate has received nearly 25,000 subscriptions since its launch in June and our Recalled Products service now lists nearly 3000 unsafe and dangerous products. We also have more services in the development and planning stages.

We are immensely proud of what we have achieved so far. Safeguarding the future of StayPrivate and RecalledProducts so that consumers can continue to benefit from their services is our main priority. We will as ever update our blog, mailing list and twitter with more details when we have them.

The CF Labs team.

We’ve been feeling our way around in this area, submitting pilot Data Protection Act and Freedom of Information requests to various bodies in an effort to hone our information-extracting skills to the level of some of the more frequent denizens over at the excellent WhatDoTheyKnow.com. Our exploits thus far are documented in the new DataBlog section here on the site. Definitely worth a read in the case of one big commercial concern at least.

But we haven’t stopped there. As firm believers in the principles of leading by example, share and share alike and giving something back, we’re currently involved in exploring ways of getting Consumer Focus data out there for use by the development community. CF commissions veritable mountains of research on an enormous range of consumer-related subjects which, after inclusion in reports, invariably ends up languishing on the system in a folder within a folder within a long-forgotten folder. It’s a common situation. Fortunately, CF shares our vision of sharing the data and to this end we’re investigating the status of licensing agreements between CF and its research contractors to make this happen at a point in the not too distant future – watch this space for developments.

If you are a registered user, you don’t need to do anything at your end, but email alerts and RSS feeds will reflect the name change.  The old domain should redirect all requests automatically.

• Is the idea within our consumer remit?
• Does the idea offer real value to the consumer/end-user?
• Has the idea already been realised? If so, is there room for support, collaborative improvement or opening up data for APIs?
• Do we have/can we obtain the resources to make the idea viable?

We’ve posted our responses on the site, but please feel free to let us know of anything you feel we may have missed in our assessments. One of the things that this exercise has highlighted is the fact that there are an abundance of sites out there that are really useful but perhaps aren’t as well known as they should be. To this end, we’re looking at producing a signposting facility over the coming weeks to make them easier to find.

In the meantime, we’re keeping our call for ideas open so please keep them coming.

Your patience is appreciated.

With regards to the technologies we’re using, the site is coded in PHP with a MySQL backend and we’re using Eclipse as our development environment along with the excellent CodeIgniter framework. Richard has talked about some of the other technologies we are using in a previous post.

Meanwhile we’ve been doing our best to get out and generally spread the word. We recently met with Richard Stirling of the Cabinet Office who is involved with the government’s Power of Information review to discuss possible ways of working together. Likewise with representatives of the TrustMark scheme. We’ve also been throwing our cards around at SXSW, Trydan Social Media Cafe in Cardiff, Ignite Cardiff & Future of Web Design 2009 to name a few. Richard gave a presentation to Consumer Focus staff earlier this month explaning the role of CF Labs along with its possibilities – hopefully there’s a few less confused people within the organisation now.

As ever, we’re appealing for your ideas. We’ve had some fantastic stuff in already & we just want more. We’ll be knocking our heads together later in the month to go through everything we’ve received and will be choosing several to develop. Big thanks to everyone who’s contributed so far.

And finally… we’ve redesigned this site to make it more attractive & easier to use. We hope you agree with us!