Initial Proposal

Global business currently operates without effective accountability, and this has led to a proliferation of unfortunate and unethical business practices, like sweatshops, child labor, and reckless environmental destruction, which are supported and even demanded by the consumer’s search for low prices. However, we strongly believe that most people would choose not to buy from unethical companies if they knew about their practice. EthiCheck aims at providing this type of information. We believe tools like this have the power to change the future of business practices for the better.

EthiCheck would be a phone app and a wiki-based website that would expose the ethical and environmental impacts of companies to consumers in the most accessible, actionable way. This will allow consumers to quickly make small decisions regarding whether to buy a product or not based on their values. Both the phone app and the website would give a recommendation on whether to buy/use a product/service based on our classification algorithm along with a “goodness” score. However, it would also provide information about the company to indicate how our recommendation was derived and to give the user the opportunity to make a more informed decision on his/her own. Also, if our recommendation were a “no buy” because we believe the company is unethical, then we would recommend a similar but ethical product that the consumer could buy. We also discussed having several categories, for example: human rights, the environment, social justice, etc, to make it more specific for each person, as someone might care more about child workers than environmental damage or vice versa. Another thing we could implement is some sort of labels like “made in United States”, “produced locally”, “international headquarters”, etc.

There are several challenges on this project. Mainly, building a good database of current and relevant information about the social responsibility of companies around the world. Secondly, developing a good algorithm in order to accurately determine whether a company is ethical or not (or more likely gradients of that). Third, implementing it as a wiki so people from around the world can add information. Lastly, incorporating a barcode reader in our application so customers can just take a picture of the barcode of a product in order to get the information.