Data sources / Product safety alerts and recalls (Recall Radar)
Product safety alerts and recalls (Recall Radar): sources and method
One row per product safety alert (product, brand, model, barcodes, category, risk, measures), and the marketplace listings that match an alert.
- Row
- Alert; match = alert x marketplace listing
- Key
- Alert id; GTIN barcode and brand for the join to listings
- Refresh
- Alerts weekly (EU Safety Gate publishes on Fridays; CPSC and OPSS as issued). Matches after each marketplace crawl.
Where it comes from
| Source | How we read it | Licence or basis |
|---|---|---|
| EU Safety Gate (RAPEX), European Commission | Official weekly report download API (XML), anonymous | Reuse under Commission Decision 2011/833/EU with acknowledgement of the source (CC BY 4.0 by default); images belong to the notifiers and are linked, not copied |
| US Consumer Product Safety Commission: Recall Retrieval web services | Official JSON web service, anonymous | US federal government work (public domain); the service page states no further terms |
| UK Office for Product Safety and Standards: alerts, reports and recalls (GOV.UK) | GOV.UK search and content APIs, anonymous | Open Government Licence v3.0 |
| Our own marketplace crawls (Amazon, AliExpress, Etsy, TikTok Shop) | Public product and search pages that answer an anonymous visitor, no login | Listing facts only (id, title, price, seller id); no descriptions, no seller names |
How the data is collected
- Every week the new alerts of the three authorities are read through their documented interfaces and kept with the official alert link.
- Barcodes are kept only when the GTIN check digit is valid. The text of an alert passes a filter that removes emails and phone numbers.
- Each alert is compared with the listings of our marketplace crawls in order of evidence: the listing the alert names (confidence 0.99), the same barcode (0.97), brand plus model code or nearly all name words (0.80 to 0.93). Another colour, flavour or size of the same product line is not matched. Matches below 0.75 are not stored.
- Every match is worded "listing matches a recall alert, verify". It is a lead for a check, never a statement that a listing is illegal.
Legal basis and collection rules
- Alerts are official public information published for reuse; the attribution line travels with the data.
- Marketplace pages are read only where they answer an anonymous visitor.
- Only pages and endpoints that answer an anonymous visitor: no login, no account, no credentials, tokens or keys of anyone else, no paywalled content.
- Before a source goes live we read its robots.txt and terms and record what they say. They are one of the signals we weigh for each source, together with whether the data is public without login and what the data is.
- Low request rates, only the pages and fields we need, and we slow down or stop when a site signals it.
Personal data
- Alerts describe products. Notifier, consumer-contact and retailer fields are not read.
- A seller is shown only as the marketplace seller id; seller names are never output, because a seller can be a private person.
Details: privacy policy.
Quality and limits
- Each alert links to the official page; each match links to the listing.
- Matching precision is measured on hand-checked samples and published with the method.
- Only listings our crawls have seen: a recalled product on a marketplace we do not crawl, or not yet crawled, is not matched.
- Many alerts have no barcode and no brand; those can only match when the alert names the listing.
How to get it
Removal requests
If you run a source we read, or a record is about you or your business, write to [email protected] with the source or the record (a domain or a URL is enough). We stop collecting it and remove it from the files, the API, the MCP tools and the data pages within 24 hours, and reply once it is done.