ENG Introducing our new project, Open Prices
We’re happy to announce Open Prices, the first open crowdsourced database of food prices!
The goal is to collect and share prices of food products around the world. It’s a publicly available dataset that can be used by all for research, analysis, and more.
FR
Nous sommes ravis d’annoncer Open Prices, la première base de données ouverte et participative des prix alimentaires !
L’objectif est de recueillir et de partager les prix des produits alimentaires à travers le monde. Il s’agit d’un jeu de données disponible publiquement, pouvant être utilisé par tous à des fins de recherche, d’analyse et autre.
Comme pour Open Food Facts, nous avons besoin de volontaires prêts à nous aider à construire ce projet ensemble en ajoutant les prix des magasins d’alimentation à proximité.
Well made, thanks.
There is a link to the product in OpenFoodFacts.
Perhaps it would be an idea to also include a link to the prices in OpenFoodFacts on the product pages?
As multiple photos are added for a product on OFF when an entry is created, it would be easy to upload photo of its price also at the same time. I suggest using both channels to add/edit prices - the main OFF app & the Prices web app (for more frequent updates).
Hi
I tried the prices feature within OpenFoodFacts app today. There were two things that are something that are keeping me from adding more at the moment.
adding a photo is mendatory. This is quite time consuming and I wouldn’t wanna show off all the things I buy. For all other facts adding images is optional.
Which leads us to
promenently linking prices and location to an account is quite a privacy concern to me.
I feel like the data doesn’t benefit very much from having it associated with a certain person.
Theoretically you could prevent false prices but I don’t feel like having anonymouized reports would be a huge risk.
I feel like this feature could be really useful for comparing prices between stores and also across time and for discounts.
Hello Hedaja,
We require a proof for each price, as otherwise we have no way to say whether the price added by the user is true or not.
Contrary to other food facts, there is no way once a price was added to know without the proof whether it’s correct or not (we cannot go back in time to this particular place to check whether the price is valid).
We trust our users to do the right thing, but there would be a legal risk for the Open Food Facts organization if we didn’t do so.
Concerning privacy, it’s a subject we’re aware of and that we try to imrpove. For data quality, moderators must be able to see the prices added by a user, and contact this user if necessary.
But we don’t necessarily need to make this information available to everyone. We although thought of creating a unique identifier (distinct from your username) that will be displayed instead of it.
Any feedback or proposition on this subject is welcome!
More information about the project
Web app to add prices
A quick tutorial to add a priceIf tech-savy people are interested, we’re looking for help from developers (vue.js, Python) as well
