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.

As the statutory consumer watchdog for postal services, it is the responsibility of Consumer Focus to scrutinise this data and help the public hold the Royal Mail to account.

Recently, we’ve been working with our policy team in Consumer Focus Wales to see how we can improve the transparency and visibility of the information we receive from the Royal Mail. Today we are pleased to launch the Wales Mail Report – a tool to make this data available to the public in an easily digestible form.

The Wales Mail Report takes the quality of service and complaints data from numerous large PDF documents and presents it in HTML tables with interactive charts. We’ve broken the data down by postcode area so you can see how well the Royal Mail is performing in your area. We’ll also be updating the data every time new figures are published.

Best of all – we’ve made everything available in open formats. You can download all the information in CSV and JSON formats under the Open Government Licence.

Although the tool only covers the postcode areas in Wales at the moment, we hope to be able to do the same for other parts of the UK over the next few months.

Let us know what you think and if you re-use the data we’d love to see what you’ve been able to do.

Our supplier has worked to replace the faulty equipment and bring our services back online.  This work was completed at around 2.15pm this afternoon.  There are however a few outstanding issues with some of our websites:

• We have taken the decision to temporarily suspend new registrations on StayPrivate.org for a few hours to ensure that the server is stable and no problems occur.
• Recalled Product alert emails that should have been sent this morning have not been sent.  We will schedule these to be sent later today.

This blog and the CF Labs twitter account will be updated when the items above are resolved. We will be monitoring situation for the next few hours to ensure everything is running normally and will publish a more detailed post later in the week once we’ve had a chance to discuss the cause with our supplier.

We apologise for any inconvenience this outage may have caused.

Update (18:27): We are now accepting new registrations on StayPrivate.org.

Update 2 (21:26): This morning’s recall alerts have now been sent.

Since the first report was published in March 2010, a new rating scheme has been developed by the Food Standards Agency (FSA). This scheme will give all food premises in England and Wales a rating between 5 (very good) and 0 (urgent improvement necessary) dependent on the outcome of hygiene inspections.

The second of these annual reports was launched at the Senedd (the home of the National Assembly for Wales) earlier today. While compiling this report, staff identified more than 60 premises serving food to vulnerable people that achieved a substandard rating (2 or below). These premises included schools, colleges, nurseries, care premises and hospitals.

We were asked if we could plot these premises on a map to show where they were located to accompany the report.

Luckily, the Food Standards Agency publishes all of their content under the Open Government Licence. This meant that we could build a scraper to work through the food hygiene website to pull out the qualifying ratings to use on the map.

We also used open data from mySociety’s MaPit service to pinpoint the location of each premises so we could plot it on a Google Map. The MaPit service uses data published under open licences by Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey.

If you want to know more about this work, take a look at the press release, published report and map. Welsh language versions of the press release, report and map are also available.

The biggest change you’ll notice is the design of the site. It’s more of an evolution of the design than a brand new look – we’ve kept the same structure, but given it a bit more of a “CF Labs” style (similar to StayPrivate.org and Community Post Offices).

We’ve increased the width of the site which has allowed us to improve the layout of the product recall notices. We’ll be making better use of this extra space on other parts of the site over the coming months.

We’ve also spent some time working on the recall statistics we generate – in some cases, we felt they weren’t particularly clear. For example, the chart showing the top dangers in recall notices included “chemical” near the top, but further down it also included “chemical and damage to sight”, “chemical and drowning” and “injuries, choking and chemical”.

This meant that some of the figures weren’t fully representative of the real numbers. As a result, we’ve completely rebuilt the statistics engine to take account of this kind of thing. This has also enabled us to output the data in CSV and JSON formats for those that want it. As always, these statistics are available under the Open Government Licence.

The other big change we’ve made is to the scraper we use to import recall notices from the European Union RAPEX system. Occasionally odd characters crept onto the notices where certain special characters hadn’t been encoded properly by the source. We’ve updated the scraper so it handles this encoding on their behalf prior to importing to reduce the likelyhood of this happening in future.  To improve the existing data on the site, we’ve gone back and re-imported the latest 300 recalls (everything from January 2011 and most of December 2010).

Occasionally RAPEX make changes to notices that have been published such as fixing errors, adding additional information or removing notices that have been cancelled. While we were picking up and replicating these changes before, our updated scraper allows us to detect these in much greater detail.

To ensure users can see an accurate history of each recall notice, we’ve now included a column on the notice’s page that will list any changes made. Where a text change has taken place, we’ll include the original text for comparison. You can see an example of this on one of the recalls we re-imported yesterday.

We’ve got more improvements planned over the next few months, so keep an eye out for updates on this blog.

Data encryption

When you sign up to StayPrivate.org you provide us with a significant amount of personal data. At a minimum you provide us with your name, email address and postal address. If you are a business, you also provide us with details about your organisation.

You then have to provide varying amounts of data depending on which of the marketing opt-out services you wish to use. This includes things like telephone numbers (for the TPS, CTPS & FPS) and names of other people at your address (for the MPS).

All of this information is encrypted when it is stored in our database. For example, my name ‘Dafydd’ becomes something like ‘A0JQNABiWi5SawY2’ or ‘BEUEYFQ2WCwHPgAw’. Without the encryption key, we can’t decode it to see what it means and neither can anyone else.

Data storage

This is another key element in our service – we don’t store data for any longer than is absolutely necessary and you can ask us to destroy it at any time. The options open to you depend on what you select when you register.

If you don’t sign up for an account, we will destroy the data once we’ve registered you with the opt-out services. This is done automatically & there is nothing for you to do.

If you signed up for an account but didn’t tick the “store data” box, we’ll automatically destroy everything except your name and email address once we’ve registered you with the services. You can ask us to destroy the rest by clicking the “Close Account” button in the dashboard.

If you signed up the account and ticked the “store data” box, we’ll keep it until you ask us to destroy it. We’ll send you a reminder every year and ask you to confirm you still want us to keep it – if you don’t, we’ll destroy it automatically. You don’t need to wait for the reminder however – at any point you can ask us to destroy it by clicking the “Close Account” or “Delete Data” buttons in the dashboard.

Secured Connection

On Monday this week we launched full SSL encryption on StayPrivate.org. If you’ve ever used online banking or shopped online, you might be familiar with the padlock that appears in your web browser to show that the webpage is secure.

This means that your web browser is using a secure connection (HTTPS) to communicate with the website to ensure the data you send and receive remains private.

From this week, StayPrivate.org is only available using a secure connection, so you will see that padlock on every page of the website. Whenever you view data on the site or send data to us, it will be secured and will remain private.

This is an important step forward for StayPrivate and ensures that security and privacy of your data is being taken care of at each step in the process.

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.

There are many different reasons for wanting to stop automated scripts from submitting forms. For example, scripts are regularly used to submit spam comments to blogs or to attempt to guess a user’s password by trying many different combinations very quickly.

Unfortunately CAPTCHAs introduce a big accessibility problem as they rely on visual perception (being able to see and understand the text). Any users with visual difficulties (for example, users with a disability) will potentially have trouble completing the test correctly. Anyone who uses a screen reader to browse websites will not be able to complete the form because it cannot read the image – after all, if it could, it would defeat the whole object of the test. Some CAPTCHA tests also include an audio version alongside the image, but this does not resolve the issues completely.

Because of these accessibility issues, we try and avoid using CAPTCHAs on all CF Labs applications. We try and make use of other methods such as email verification (where we send you a link in an email which you need to click) and only use CAPTCHAs as a last resort.

In the case of our StayPrivate.org service, we’ve built a CAPTCHA into our ‘log in’ and ‘forgotten password’ process – however we hope that the vast majority of users will never see it. While we want to reduce the possibility of an automated script trying to break into a user account, we didn’t want to impose a CAPTCHA every time you try to log in. Instead, we only show it if you enter the wrong email address and password combination three times in 15 minutes. This method means that the vast majority of users never see the image (and so do not face the accessibility issues), while we can reduce the threat of automated scripts.

To assist the minority that do activate this test, we’ve chosen to use the reCAPTCHA service which includes an audio version as well as the standard image.

This is not a perfect solution but hopefully it is a good compromise between security, accessibility and ease of use.

Last year, Consumer Focus appointed a new supplier of the data required to run the service, which necessitated a complete rebuild of the system. Due to limited time and resources, we opted to undertake the rebuild in two phases:

1. Build new back end and database with basic front end
2. Build new front end

In January we launched the first phase of the project. From a visitor perspective, they would have noticed very few changes – we essentially copied the existing interface design and hooked it up to the new database. The biggest change was behind the scenes – we pretty much started from a blank sheet of paper.

Previously we received new data every week or so with updated prices, now the new supplier (Energylinx) provide us with an XML feed every time a price change occurs – this ensures we have much more accurate data. We also changed platforms – moving from Windows/ASP.Net to Linux/PHP.

A few weeks ago, we completed the second phase and launched a brand new front end to the site. Previously the EPC was stuck in an iframe on the Consumer Focus website, now it carries the full template and appears as if it is part of the website.

We’ve included various improvements such as bookmarkable URLs for price searches (previously you would have to fill out the search form every time you wanted to check prices), clearer highlighting of cheapest prices, and details of when the prices were last updated.

We’ve reintroduced the PDF Fact Sheets and improved the monthly emails which are sent out. We’ve also borrowed some of the elements of the StayPrivate.org “account” system, to improve the way users can sign up for the monthly alerts and manage their settings.

As always, we’re not done and will continue to make improvements over the next few months. If you have any suggestions or feedback let us know.