If the organisation you are complaining to has a form or webform, it will guide you through the process and make sure you supply all the details they need.

Otherwise, you need to answer the following questions:

1. Who is making the complaint?
2. Where are the claims being made?
3. Who is making the claims?
4. What are the claims you think are misleading?
5. Why do you think the claims are misleading and what might the effect be? (Optional)

Who is making the complaint?

Obvious, perhaps, but worth mentioning: make sure the organisation you are complaining to know who you are so they can reply to you. Also, many organisations will not accept anonymous complaints.

However, consider carefully what personal information you want to divulge. Check any complaints procedure to see what information they require. If you are not happy divulging personal details they seem to require or have concerns about their privacy policy, try to discuss it with them first and come to an agreement with them.

Complaints should be made in your own name: even though you may have used advice from our website, please do not suggest that you are submitting a complaint on our behalf or imply that you are associated with the Nightingale Collaboration.

Where are the claims being made?

You need to give sufficient information to clearly identify where the claims were made. If it was a leaflet, give the full title of the leaflet, the publisher and anything else given on the leaflet. If it was a newspaper or magazine, give the title, publisher, etc and say which issue it was and which page the claims were on.

Ideally, you should provide a copy of the leaflet, advert, etc. This could be sent in the post or scanned in and attached to an email or web form.

If the claims were on a website, provide the URL of the page or pages and ideally a cached copy of them in case they change.

Read Capturing web pages for further details.

Who is making the claims?

Give as much detail as possible. If it's an advert, give the advertiser's name or trading name. If it's not clear, you could spend a bit of time trying to find out, but don't worry if you can't. Resources that might help are business directories, Companies House, and, for websites, the domain name registrant.

Read How to find out who owns a website for further details.

What are the claims you think are misleading?

In a simple advert, it should be easy to highlight the words you think are problematic. If you think it is necessary, explain what either you think the words mean or what you think other members of the public will take the words to mean.

You could list the sections or paragraphs of the code of conduct or whatever rules you think the advertiser has not followed, but this will not always be necessary. For example, the Advertising Standards Authority are experts in their own code so there is no need to highlight section 3.1 of the CAP Code!

However, there may be good reasons for highlighting sections/paragraphs other than the obvious one: if a code of conduct talks about bringing the 'profession' into disrepute, abusing the trust of the public, doing only what's in the public's best interests or similar words, it might be worth highlighting that you think the person you are complaining about has fallen foul of those as well.

Why do you think the claims are misleading and what might the effect be?

Briefly explain why you think the claims are misleading. This will frequently be simply that you don't believe they are capable of substantiation by the advertiser (or anyone else). For the ASA, that is all you have to say, but it may be worth expanding your reasons for complaints to other organisations.

Some useful stock phrases:

• Because of the lack of a plausible mechanism of action for and/or the lack of any robust clinical evidence to support these claims, I believe these claims are highly misleading.
• I believe these claims may delay or dissuade people, particularly the gullible or vulnerable, with serious medical conditions from seeking proper and possibly urgently needed medical advice and treatment.
• I believe these claims abuse the trust of members of the public and exploits their lack of experience or knowledge about health.

Putting pen to paper

Writing the complaint is very straightforward, regardless of who you are complaining to — just follow this simple guidance.

• Keep it simple and to the point.
• Keep it impersonal and factual.

You're not writing the story of your life, so just focus on precisely what you think is misleading.

Make your complaint logical and easy for someone to follow what your saying. A good way of doing this is to follow the advice of the Plain English Campaign:

Visit the website of the Plain English Campaign for further advice and to read their free guides to writing clear and understandable English.

Many organisations provide an online form for complaints (eg the ASA), but these can sometimes be inadequate or difficult to use. Organisations should also accept complaints made by email or letter.

Keep a copy of your complaint and a copy of any leaflet, newspaper, etc so you can refer to it in the event of any query. Some organisations, such as the ASA, do not send you a copy of what you submitted in their webform.

It is usually essential to capture a web page or a number of pages as evidence that particular claims have been made.

There are a number of ways to do capture a web page:

1. Create a pdf of the page/pages;
2. Copy the HTML of the page, including the graphics and other files;
3. Capturing complete websites;
4. Use a page caching service to save a copy of the page.

There are advantages and disadvantages for each method and the success will depend on the web page you are trying to capture. Capturing several different websites may need different techniques.

In many cases, a pdf writer will give be a reasonably faithful copy of the web page. However, some web pages do not come out well, sometimes just missing out the graphics (eg WordPress and Blogspot blogs). The text is usually captured, but the page graphics may be removed and the layout of the page messed up. That may not be that important, but it is usually better to have a more accurate copy of the web page. The only way to find out is to try it.

Sometimes a pdf writer will produce a blank page or one with most of the content missing. You'll need to find a different solution.

Adobe ShockWave Flash pages are particularly difficult to capture.

Pdf writers

These are useful for creating a copy of a webpage. pdf file are ubiquitous and can be opened and read on most PCs.

The easiest way to capture a web page is to convert it to a pdf. pdfFactory is good and costs around £32, but there are some free alternatives:

PDFCreator

CutePDF

PDF Complete

Once installed, a new printer will appear in your list of printers. Although this may sound odd, to create a pdf of a web page all you have to do is to print the page to the pdf printer. You will then have the opportunity to save the resulting pdf file to your hard drive. This isn't just for creating a pdf of a web page — the pdf printer will be available from any Windows program and can be used to, say, create a pdf of a Word document or of a graphic in your favourite graphics program.

If your pdf writer can't cope with the way a page has been created, you will need to find another way to capture it.

Although it doesn't create a pdf from web pages, a useful free online alternative to creating a pdf from a Word document is to use PDF Online. Once your Word document is uploaded to the PDF Online website, it will be converted to a pdf and emailed to you. This is fine for an occasional document, but not for continual use!

Saving a webpage

Individual web pages can be stored on your PC.

Firefox

Click on File: Save Page As… There are two useful options under Save as type: Web Page, complete and Web Page, HTML only.

The first Save as type: creates a file that has the same name as to web page you are capturing. A folder is also created with the same name and this stores all the other information needed to reproduce the web page, including the graphics and style sheets. Once saved, it can be viewed in your browser and is should look the same as the original on the Internet. However, because the saved web page consists a file and a folder, it's a bit more difficult to send them to others.

The second Save as type: option does not store the graphice and style sheets, so you just get a basic web page with little or no formatting.

Internet Explorer

Click on File: Save As… There are three useful options under Save as type: Webpage, complete (*.htm, *.html), Web Archive, single file (*.mht) and Webpage, HTML only (*.htm, *.html),

The first and third options are similar to the Firefox options. The second option (Web Archive, single page) creates a single file that is easier to move around, but it can only be opened in Internet Explorer.

Google Chrome

Click on Customise and control Google Chrome: Save page as…There are two options under Save as type: Web Page, Complete and Web page, HTML Only. These are the same as the Firefox options.

Other browsers should be similar to those above.

Caching pages

An online cached copy of a web page can be very useful. One excellent service is FreezePage. They offer 5 MB free storage space and 10 MB if you register with them. Larger capacities up to 300 MB can be bought

A page can be captured by going to the FreezePage website and entering the URL of the page you want to capture. Alternatively, a button is available for your broswer toolbar that lets you capture a page directly.

Although there are some restrictions — the Web page must be less than 1.5 MB in total, have less than 250 embedded elements (images, stylesheets, script files, etc) and be retrievable within 90 seconds — in practice, it will capture the vast majority of pages. If you don't take out a subscription, you must also visit the site occasionally (30 days for unregistered users or 60 days for registered users) or you will lose files. If you take out a subscription, the pages are not deleted.

Once FreezePage has captured a page, it is given URL with a unique 20-character identifier and the page can be seen by anyone you give this URL to. Part of the URL is the date and time you froze the page (in Unix time format). See their FAQ for further details.

Another great feature of FreezePage is that it allows cached pages to be organised into folders. This helps spearate out different web pages captured for different purposes.

It is useful when writing about a web page to give a link to that page and also a link to the cached FreezePage page so that it can be seen what may have changed on the page.

There are several web services that will notify you if a web page changes.

One of these is www.changedetection.com.

You need to sign up, but the service is free. Once singed up, you enter the URL of a page you want to monitor. There are various options to select, but, by default, it will check the web page once a day and send you an email if it sees any changes. Alternatively, it can send the alert to your RSS feed.

When ChangeDetection sends you an alert, it will give you the URL of the web page it's monitoring and a link to the ChangeDetection change log for that page. The change log shows the last 30 changes it has detected, so you can look back at previous changes. Text that has been deleted is shown like this and new text is highlighted in yellow so you can see exactly what's changed.

ChangeDetection can also compare two web pages for you and show you what's been added and what's been deleted.

There are many guides to using the Google search engine and there's no need to repeat it all here. However, the following features are useful to anyone trying to gather evidence for a complaint.

Google cache

Other Google functions

Firefox add-on for searching cached pages

Further reading

Google cache

As Google trawls through the Internet, it creates snapshot copies of the pages it finds — these copies are called cached pages. If a website owner removes or changes the content of a page on their website, the cached copy will be deleted or updated the next time Google checks it. This means that, even though a page may have changed or been deleted, it may still be available in Google's cache. How long it remains there depends on how frequently Google checks that website: for popular websites and pages, Google may check them very frequently, but for less popular ones, the old cache may remain there for days or weeks.

This means that, even though a page has been changed, it may be possible to see what it said before that change. This can be very useful in researching.

Access to these cached Google pages is easy and can be done in several ways.

Search results

When Google returns the results of a search, it usually has a link to the cached page:

Cache operator

However, if you already know the URL of the page you want to check, you can look at the Google cached page by entering the following into the Google search box in your browser. For example:

cache:www.chiropractic-uk.co.uk
cache:http://craniosacral.co.uk/cstchildren.html

Cache results

At the top of the returned page, Google gives information about the cached page. For example:

This is Google's cache of http://www.chiropractic-uk.co.uk/. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on 29 Nov 2010 17:17:31 GMT. The current page could have changed in the meantime. Learn more

This gives the date and time Google cached the page, which could be useful to help determine whan a page changed. It also gives a link to the current page.

A useful feature of the cached page is that any search terms you used will be highlighted on the page, making it much quicker, especially in a text heavy page, to see how frequently your search terms appear and in what context.

Other Google functions

Google has other useful functions related to this. If you enter info: followed by a URL, you will see something like this:

Of these, the fourth one is very useful. This allows you to see all pages that Google has found on that website. You can get to this directly by entering site: followed by the URL into Google's search box. If you add a search term as well, Google will return a list of the pages on that website that have that word in them. This is Google's Site Search and is useful even if the website does not offer its own search facility. It will frequently return more results than the site's own search facility.

For example, if you enter:

site:www.chiropractic-uk.co.uk "simon singh"

you will see all pages on the BCA's website that mention Simon Singh.

A feature of Google's Site Search is that it will return pages even if they are not currently accessible from a link on another page, but which were linked to when Google indexed the site. This is particularly useful in finding pages that have been 'removed' but are still, in fact, on the website and can still be returned by search engines.

Because a page is in Google's cache, it can appear in the search results, bringing a viewer to their website, even though it is disconnected from the rest of the web site.

If you can't remember the exact URL you can search for a word within the URL using inurl: and add a search term to refine things, eg inurl:nightingale skeptics and site:URL filetype:pdf would let you uncover .pdfs within a given site's URL. There are many other search refinements in the 'Advanced search' option — see Further reading, below.

Browser add-ons for finding cached pages

If you use Firefox you can download the 'Resurrect Pages' add-on gives easy access to a number of caches, including Google's. For Google's Chrome browser, try the Web Cache extension.

Further reading

GoogleGuide on cached pages

Google Web Search Help

Finding things that aren't there any more on the internet, and storing things that are

What appears on a web page is determined by its underlying code. Content can be removed from a page by deleting it or hiding it (by preventing it from appearing when the page loads) — viewing the source code can sometimes show you 'commented out' text that has been hidden from the page in this way. This was one of the methods used by bloggers to demonstrate that Gillian McKeith's Twitter account was an official one, after it was hidden from her website to disguise the link between the two.

In Internet Explorer: View > Source
In Firefox: Ctrl+U (or View > Page Source)
In Safari: Ctrl+Alt+U (or View > View Source)
In Chrome: Right-click > View page source

Commented out text is placed within <!-- and -->. However it's also worth searching for key terms (using Ctrl+F) too.

Google's cache is not permanent because the search engine periodically refreshes its index and so the new page (with the text deleted) will eventually replace the cached verson that has the text present. For content that's been comprehensively deleted from the website then the Internet Archive might help. This maintains a permanent record of a huge number of websites and content is posted, on average, six months after it was collected. This can mean a wait of a few months before the content you're looking for appears.

Enter the URL (just use the main bit of the address, eg http://www.website.com not http://www.website.com/pages/page.htm) in the dialogue box here and click the 'Take Me Back' button and see what you can find. Note that you may be able to download historic files from these pages, but that certain pages may be missing entirely - it can be pot luck.

The Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOI) and Environmental Information Regulations 2004 (EIR) introduced a right to information held by public authorities which came fully into force in 2005. However, like all rights, it should be used responsibly by those who exercise it.

Here, FOI Man (@FOIManUK), a public sector employee with several years’ experience of advising on and answering FOI and EIR requests, outlines the best way to make sure you get the most out of both regimes without creating unnecessary burdens on public authorities.

Except where otherwise specified below, FOI is used to denote both pieces of legislation.

Why should I care?

FOI is a right. Full stop. You absolutely have the right to ask a public authority for any information that you like. Unless your request is invalid, vexatious, covered by one of the exemptions, or the authority doesn’t hold it, they have to make the information available to you. To an extent, you’re even allowed to dictate in which format they should provide it to you. So you have the power.

But should you use that power? And if you do use it, should you consider the impact it might have on the public authority concerned? In these times of cuts and mass redundancies, is it right that scarce resources are spent digging around for information that you might have lost interest in by the time you get a response? And if you’re a campaigner, trying to engage your local politicians, do you really want to risk getting on the wrong side of them through your use of FOI? Is it a Pyrrhic victory if you get your information at the cost of officials’ time that could have been spent on doing the things you’re campaigning for?

And there could be implications further down the road if we don’t use FOI responsibly. In other countries where FOI has been in place for years, enthusiastic early adoption has often led to a backlash from politicians and the courts. In Ireland, a prohibitive fees regime was introduced; in New Zealand, the courts considering appeals began to interpret exemptions restrictively. Over here, we’ve seen an attempt by politicians to remove themselves from FOI (thankfully rewarded with contempt from all sides), and there are regular calls from senior officials in various parts of the public sector for their particular area to be excluded from the legislation.

It’s really easy to fire off an email asking for information. You can even send it to several thousand public authorities in one go. But be aware of the resource and other implications of that simple act. Here are my ten top tips on how to make effective, responsible use of FOI.

Ten Top Tips on Making Responsible and Effective FOI Requests

1.  Count to ten before clicking ‘Send’

Or better still, sleep on it. Consider if you really do want the information, and if you do, whether you have asked the right questions.

2. Do your research

Is the information already available on the authority’s website, perhaps in their Publication Scheme? Is there information there that could be used to make your question(s) more relevant or incisive? Has the question been asked before? There may be a ‘Disclosure Log’ on their website, or failing that, you could check WhatDoTheyKnow.com.

3. Take care when making ‘round robin’ requests

Remember that the more organisations you send your request to, the more public money will be spent on answering your request. And use your research to weed out authorities that the request isn’t relevant to.

4. Try an informal approach first if possible

You may already have a professional relationship with somebody within the public authority. Alternatively, the authority may publish direct contact details for the department that deals with the issue you’re concerned about. Try contacting them first to sound them out. At the very least they may be able to advise you as to what to ask for, and occasionally, they may even be able to give you more information than you would be entitled to under FOI.

5. Be specific

If you do decide to make a FOI request, cite the Act in your request (you don’t have to but it can help to avoid confusion). Make your request as clear as possible. Don’t be ambiguous. You can’t blame a public authority for misinterpreting your request if you’ve not specified clearly what you want.

6. Don’t be greedy

It’s tempting to throw everything including the kitchen sink into your request. Don’t. Keep your request short and to the point. You can always make other requests later if you want more information.

7. Be polite

Try not to assume that the person reading your request is determined to avoid answering your question(s). It’s likely that members of your own family, perhaps some of your friends, are public servants. Would you feel content to send them your request?

8. Be patient

Your request isn’t the only request that will be received by the authority. The people who have to answer your request will also have a number of other responsibilities to meet. Try to be patient and accept that you may not get an answer as quickly as you would like. In the vast majority of cases you will get a response before the statutory deadline of 20 working days (and note that phrase, ‘working days’ — in effect, organisations have a month to respond, give or take a couple of days).

9. Read the response carefully, and if necessary, use the Appeal process

A lot of effort goes into answering FOI requests, even (often especially) when your request is refused. Make sure you’ve understood the response.

Accept that in some cases, the authority just does not hold the information you’ve asked for. You may think they should, but if they haven’t, you can’t use FOI to force them to create it. Often the authority will explain why they don’t hold it — try to read their explanation with an open mind.

If your request has been refused using one of the exemptions (FOI) or exceptions (EIR), the authority should have provided you with an explanation of which ones apply and how. Where a public interest test has been applied, they should have explained the arguments for and against disclosure.

Try to take a step back and consider whether their arguments make sense. For instance, although you might like to have access to information about employees, you probably understand that some of that information is protected by the Data Protection Act. Whilst you may not be happy with the response, it may be that the Act has been applied correctly.

If the arguments don’t make sense or you disagree with them, and you still want the information, use the authority’s Internal Review process. The authority should have sent you details of this process with their response. All you really need to do though is to write to them, asking for an internal review. It will help your case if you set out the reasons why you think the exemptions/exceptions don’t apply. Where a public interest test has been applied, you can put forward your own arguments for disclosure if you don’t think these have been considered.

Again, be patient whilst waiting for a response, and when you do receive it, read it carefully. If you are still dissatisfied with it, consider contacting the Information Commissioner and asking him to review the response. Bear in mind that this may take some time — though turnaround times at the Commissioner’s Office have improved considerably in the last year.

10. Use the information you receive responsibly

If you want to use the information you’ve been sent, do so responsibly. One example of this is asking for permission if you want to reproduce a document that’s been sent to you (or at the very least acknowledging the source). Even though you’ve been sent the information, the copyright will normally still belong to the authority concerned or whoever gave it to them.

If you’re reporting on the information disclosed, try to provide context. Often the response will include an explanation of why, for instance, so much was spent on the particular activity you’ve asked about, or how spending compares with other similar organisations. Even if it doesn’t, it will often be a straightforward task to find contextual data or background. Whilst it may not make for as spectacular a story, excluding these facts could distort the impression given to your audience. This impression may well be convenient in the short term, but it could damage your reputation with the organisations that provide information to you, and ultimately with your audience if they learn that they are being misled.

Other resources you may find useful

Information Commissioner’s guide to making FOI requests

Information Commissioner’s Charter for Responsible FOI Requests

Information Commissioner’s guidance on appealing decisions

NCVO guide to using FOI for campaigning

Originally posted at How to make responsible and effective FOI requests. Reproduced with permission.

FOI Man can be followed on Twitter as @FOIManUK.

Also see:

FOI & Copyright: What’s the Big Deal?

Re-using Public Sector information: what you need to know

Sometimes, it is not clear who is responsible for claims being made on a website. Responsible websites will provide appropriate contact details, but occasionally the actual seller will not be obvious. However, there are easy steps you can take to find out who owns the domain name — although this could conceivably be different to the person or company responsible for the claims made on that website. Occasionally, some useful information can be gleaned from knowing who owns the domain name.

Whois

The domain name is what you type into a browser to take you to a website. This is usually very closely related to the organisation that runs the website and advertises its products or services.

The Whois system can provide the name of the domain name owner (the Registrant) and contact details. There are many websites that provide Whois services including Who.is  and Network Tools. Some can provide other useful information as well.

As an example, lets see what information can be found for the website of the British Chiropractic Association, www.chiropractic-uk.co.uk.

Using Network Tools, type their domain name (chiropractic-uk.co.uk) into the box, ensure 'Whois' is selected and click on 'Go'.

Since we are checking a UK website, the results come from the UK Registry operator (Nominet):

Results returned from whois.nic.uk:

Domain name:
chiropractic-uk.co.uk

Registrant:
British Chiropractic Association

Registrant type:
Unknown

Registrant's address:
c/o Typeline, 26 The Hawthorns
Charvil
READING
Berkshire
RG10 9TS
United Kingdom

This is publicly available information and gives us the name and address of the Registrant.

Note that if the domain is used as part of a business, trade or profession, Nominet Terms and Conditions require that the Registrant's name and address are made public and accessible to whois queries.

If you find a website that is clearly part of a business, trade or profession, but which has the Registrant type as 'UK Individual' you can report this to Nominet who will investigate and may take action against the Registrant.

This simple Whois query will usually give you details of who controls the website and therefore the person or company responsible for claims made on that website. This may also indicate a link with some other organisation.

However, even if you are not sure who owns the domain name or who runs the website, the onus is not on you as complainant to provide that information; you should still submit the complaint and leave it to that organisation to find out.

UK Individual