For the first time ever, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) plans to make public thousands of complaints it receives from Americans about harmful products. Consumer advocates have hailed the decision to create a Web-based database containing the information, while many businesses are lobbying to disrupt the effort.
The CPSC has collected complaints from consumers for years, but until now, citizens had to file a public records request to see the information. Once the database is launched on March 11 at SaferProducts.gov, the same materials will be only an Internet search away.
And that has companies very nervous.
"We're not opposed to a database," Rosario Palmieri, vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers, told The Washington Post. "We're opposed to a database that's full of inaccurate information."
Palmieri and other business representatives claim competitors could use the database to fill it with erroneous complaints to drive customers away from certain products
C. Gibson Vance, president of the association of trial lawyers, sees the database differently. He pointed to the example of drywall from China that caused numerous problems for homeowners in the Southeast.
"Had this database been available, both the CPSC and American consumers likely would have been able to determine that there was, in fact, a systemic problem with drywall from China and stopped using it," Vance wrote to the CPSC. "Without this database in place, it took the CPSC and the general public approximately three years to conclude that there was in fact a problem."
Under the new system, when a consumer files a complaint, the CPSC has five days to notify the manufacturer and the manufacturer then has ten days to respond. Both the complaint and the response will then be posted for the public to see.
The database will cover 15,000 types of consumer products overseen by the CPSC.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Consumer Product Safety Commission to Launch Public Database of Complaints (by Lyndsey Layton, Washington Post)
SaferProducts.gov (Consumer Product Safety Commission)
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