Purpose and scope of project SAFE

The rapid increase in e-commerce challenges traditional methods of
market surveillance. This development necessitates new approaches
and digital tools.

The Internet provides consumers access to an enormous global market place. Unfortunately, not all products for sale online comply with the product safety rules in the EU. However, it is a tremendous task for the market surveillance authorities to monitor the Internet for such dangerous and non-compliant products. In order to address this challenge, the Danish Safety Technology Authority seeks to provide European market surveillance authorities with a new digital tool called SAFE.

The SAFE search tool employs artificial intelligence in the form of image recognition and machine learning to identify dangerous and non-compliant products for sale online.

SAFE is funded by the European Commission and is available to all EU/EFTA market surveillance authorities.

Here is a brief explanation of the system - explained by project manager for SAFE, Martin Lykkeskov Bahr, from the Danish Safety Technology Authority.

How SAFE functions

SAFE searches the Internet for the products uploaded on the weekly notifications from Safety Gate RAPEX and ICSMS. It uses relevant search terms and the images uploaded in the databases to identify matching products marketed towards European consumers online. For each national market and on a week-ly basis, SAFE generates a list of relevant results that the national authorities can access through a user interface.

How do I join SAFE?

SAFE is available for use to all relevant EU/EFTA market surveillance authorities. Please contact the Danish Safety Technology Authority (DSTA) to gain access to the search tool. However, before SAFE can search for products in your individual market you might need to provide it with training data. The DSTA will be able to inform you whether SAFE has already been taught to search in your particular market. If this is not the case, you will need to compile training data consisting of lists of websites relevant for your market surveillance activities, as well as lists of non-relevant websites (see the FAQ for more details).

Link to SAFE

FAQ

What is SAFE?
SAFE is an AI search tool developed by the Danish Safety Technology Authority (DSTA) to assist with market surveillance of e-commerce. SAFE will search for products notified in ICSMS and Safety Gate RAPEX. SAFE is funded by the European Commission.

How can my authority gain access to SAFE?
To gain access to SAFE you will first need to notify the DSTA of your wish to participate. The DSTA will provide you with a spreadsheet you need to fill out, including information on what markets you wish to monitor and which product categories you are interested in. You might also need to compile a list of train-ing data for SAFE in order to teach the machine-learning algorithm to search for products on your market. The DSTA will likewise provide you with a spread-sheet for collecting the training data. The training must consist of:

A. 300 URLs of the kind of websites your authority is interested in monitoring (web shops, sales platforms etc.). Each link must be to a specific product for sale on the given website. The websites must be in the languages you wish to monitor.

B. 300 URLs of the kind of websites your authority is not interested in monitoring. These could be websites such as news sites, blogs, price comparison sites, Wikipedia etc.


Can the training data consist of multiple links to the same website?
No - SAFE needs many examples of different websites so that the machine-learning algorithm can be trained to recognize the different configurations of products displayed on different websites. Therefore, the DSTA would greatly appreciate if you could send us 300 examples of different websites. Remember that each link must be to a specific product for sale (rather than just the front page of the webshop).

Which technologies does SAFE use?
SAFE uses a combination of image and text recognition as well as machine-learning to process data. It uses the image recognition technology to scan the Internet for pictures of products with similar shapes and patterns. SAFE also uses a machine-learning algorithm that is able to determine whether the prod-uct appears on websites that market the product to consumers - and thereby sort out irrelevant websites.

Is it possible to limit the search to specific countries?
Yes - SAFE will be trained to differentiate between web shops that sell products to different countries sorted by web domain and languages.

Can several authorities from the same member state gain access to SAFE?
Yes - If there are several market surveillance authorities in a member state, they can all participate. The collection of training data may also be divided between the authorities. This means if there are 3 interested authorities from one member state, then each authority may collect 1/3 of the training data needed. However, the training data does not necessarily need to be equally divided between the authorities. This is left to your discretion. A variety of train-ing data covering different kind of web shops is in fact an advantage for the machine-learning algorithm of SAFE.

Is it too late for my authority to gain access to SAFE?
No - Please contact the DSTA to gain access to SAFE. Authorities can also join after SAFE has been launched on 1 December 2021. However, the DSTA might still need training data in order to teach SAFE to search for dangerous and non-compliant products in your specific national market – if it has not already been trained to do so.

Will any additional features be added to SAFE?
The DSTA welcomes any input on additional features in SAFE and will assess whether they can be implemented into SAFE after the completion of the initial project.

What is the cost for gaining access to SAFE?
There are no initial costs associated with using the SAFE search tool. The de-velopment of SAFE has been funded by the European Commission and the DSTA will cover the operational costs in the project period until 1 May 2022. The DSTA will inform all users of the future conditions for using SAFE before the end of the project.

This activity has received funding from the European Commission's DG Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs program DG Grow (2020-2022) under grant agreement - s12.824032. The content of this publication represents the views of the author only and is his/her sole responsibility; It cannot be considered to reflect the views of the European Commission and/or the Consumers, DG Grow Agency or any other body of the European Union. The European Commis-sion and the Agency do not accept any responsibility for use that may be made of the information it contains.