2. On trust - crowdsourcing is imperfect. We have a track record of detecting outbreaks. Trust is case by case, for instance if you as a consumer choose to distrust our users, you are welcome to. What we tell restaurants is that our data is imperfect but we strongly recommend against ignoring it.
2. On scraping - For food poisoning reports we do not scrape public inspection reports. We do pull in external data for related (but not food poisoning) information such as temporary restaurant closures due to food safety infractions (vermin etc), or critical violations and fail grades. We also allow consumers to report high risk food safety observations, (raw chicken burgers etc). However these are just additional data points that our subscribers and consumers want to see, they are not part of what we use for detection. Though they can be correlated. No intention to blur the lines. It is actually on our to do list to come up with an elegant way of allowing consumers to separate if they want, and we definitely want a checkbox on our map, and also in our app. We also have in our queue a way for consumers to customize their email alerts to choose which data they get.
Thanks
That looks as gray and dreadful as any McDonalds burger. The impression I get from "iwaspoisoned.com" is that the median user of the site is, shall we say, of the "steak well done" persuasion. That is fine, those people are fine (those steaks are not fine though), but they are hardly a credible source of information about foodborne illness, and I think it's probably irresponsible to present them directly alongside authoritative (and often unrelated!) reports from inspections agencies.
The real question is if anyone really cares enough to support a niche site like this. The biggest problem is that food poisoning isn't something that happens daily for anyone.
By contrast: if I report a hotel on the Bedbug Registry, I am participating in a resource that is open to everyone, not just people who pay for the enterprise app.
The first is regarding DineSafe.org: I don't understand how the model works. I see that people can "report incidents", and I see that businesses can subscribe to get analytics on reports. What I don't see is the link: what incentive do people have to report incidents? What makes the particular types of people who report perceived foodborne illness to your website a trustworthy cohort to sample from?
Regarding "Iwaspoisoned.com" (which: I think get a better name?): it looks like what you're doing is scraping public food inspection reports (Everyblock used to do that too), and then allow people to submit their own reports that run alongside them. If that's what you're doing, it's deeply misleading: food inspections are (1) an authoritative source of information and (2) not usually reports of actual foodborne illness! The net effect is to blur the lines in both directions: to create the belief that restaurants in your area are routinely shut down due to foodborne illness problems, and to present the alimentary concerns of randos as equivalently authoritative.
For what it's worth: my concern wouldn't be that reports would be "malicious" or "inauthentic" (I'm sure there are reports like that, but I also agree that you'd probably be able to keep up with them). Rather: my assumption is that you'll have an even worse version of the Yelp problem, where people write simultaneously authentic and bad, poorly informed reports. Short of "our party of 4 ate at this restaurant and all 4 of us came down with severe GI symptoms" --- which is rare --- I don't understand how you could take any report at face value. Meanwhile: your "iwaspoisoned.com" site runs firsthand reports where people simply take photographs of their food and say in effect "this looks poisonous".