Throughout the spring and early summer, we’ve seen the recall of Toyotas, Tylenol, romaine lettuce, McDonald’s Shrek glasses, baby cribs, ground beef products and a host of other items. Paying attention to all of this can be overwhelming. As the Washington Post pointed out last week, “the public is suffering from ‘recall fatigue.’ In many cases, people simply ignore urgent calls to destroy or return defective goods.”
If you’re getting sick of hearing about recalls, but also don’t want to ignore ones that might be important to you, you’ll be interested to learn about a new free app for Android phones called Recall.gov—the brainchild of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the FDA, and the Department of Agriculture.
The app lets you view snippets of all recent recalls at once, or lets you sort by recall type: car safety seats, consumer products, drugs, foods, motor vehicles, or tires. It also lets you report an incident using your hand held device.
According to the government agencies, similar apps that work with Blackberry and iPhone will be out soon. Meanwhile, non-Android users can access the same information here.
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