Critics have noted that various sites have been doing that very thing for more than a decade, and that online consumer complaint of products and services are now so commonplace.
US Congress voted overwhelmingly in August 2008 to beef up the CPSC, giving it a bigger budget and more authority to take action against unsafe products.
But that doesn't mean that industry groups aren't keeping up their campaign against the public release of consumer complaints.
"We're not opposed to a database," Rosario Palmieri, vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), told The Washington Post. "We're opposed to a database that's full of inaccurate information."
But consumer advocates say making public information public is only logical. "This is all about transparency," said Ami Gadhia, policy counsel with Consumers Union. "Commission staffers have worked very hard to ensure that the database is fair to everyone."
Consumers who files a complaint must provide his identity but the information will not be published and will be available to manufacturers only if the consumer agrees.
The agency will publish only complaints concerning safety – not complaints about reliability, price or quality. India too need a official complaint database on the same line.
