Inspiration
In today’s world, online shopping and fast-paced trends play a huge role in our daily lives, but many times, we don’t think twice about the ethical implications of the companies we know and love. To combat this, we sought a way to highlight these ethical considerations, so people can spend their money where their values are.
What it does
red flag? is a Chrome extension that pops up when browsing different websites to help users make responsible shopping choices. Companies receive either a green flag or a red flag, indicating how ethically reliable they are. Red flag companies are paired with a list of ethical considerations and alternative websites for users to keep in mind. The point of red flag? is to expose the unethical activities, like sweatshops and discrimination, of different companies so that users can make well-informed decisions about where they’re spending their money. At the end of the day, our goal is not to persuade or dissuade, but to educate and spread awareness for a brighter future.
How we built it
We scraped Reddit to find which companies are generally seen as morally questionable by a large audience, and also ran sentiment analysis with NLTK to determine whether the Reddit comments portrayed the company as good or bad. From there, we were able to compile a list of companies that are generally known as unethical. We integrated that data with front-end frameworks to check the domain of each website visited, comparing it to a database of websites with “red flags”, the reasons why those companies are disliked, and an alternative to their services. We decided that as opposed to a dedicated website or mobile app, an extension can be present in every instance and is always “one-click-away” when online shopping. Our logo was an inspiration from retro cartoons and a retro color palette, and we based most of our UI design on our ideas for the logo.
Challenges we ran into
None of us were extremely familiar with front-end development, and it was also each of our first times working with Chrome extensions. We faced some challenges navigating the different components of developing a Chrome extension and integrating the back-end tools we were more familiar with. The data collection aspect was also an obstacle. A dataset that we would really love to use, the ESG (Environment, Social, and Governance) dataset, is proprietary and would require a couple of days to get confirmed by the Georgia Tech library. That is why we resorted to web-scraping, even though a dedicated dataset for “ethical ratings” already exists.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We have a working model! Each new feature or small UI fix that we were able to implement was a reason for us to be proud of our work!
What we learned
We learned a lot, not only about the technical side of the project but also about some behind-the-scenes practices by some companies that may seem ethically sound. The technical tidbits we picked up while working on the project come second to the knowledge we are coming away with about business practice, how companies get away with some of their sneakiest schemes, and what other places we can turn to to make the world a more sustainable and responsible environment.
What's next for red flag?
We would really like to have access to the ESG data, which would help us apply our concept to a much wider range of companies, countries, and demographics. Furthermore, with some more time we would be able to build a more robust dataset of alternative companies for sustainable business and integrate more machine learning to recommend companies that a specific user would be likely to shop at (while still avoiding unethical corporations!). We also were planning on making some UI adjustments with React or Node.js which would allow some more interesting animations in the extension, so that would be part of the next iteration of red flag?.
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