Ethical Compass is a free buying-guide app that helps you weigh the ecological, ethical, and social impact of everyday purchases. It has no accounts, no advertising, and no tracking.
Questions, corrections, or guide requests: stevecbaker@gmail.com. This app is built and maintained by one person, so please allow a few days for a reply.
Scan to Guide looks the product up in the Open Facts databases (Open Food Facts, Open Beauty Facts, and Open Products Facts) and opens the matching buying guide. If no guide matches, tap "Choose the guide yourself" and pick one from the list.
Some products are not in those databases yet — especially new or store-brand items — and the app cannot identify them. Non-retail barcodes, such as library book codes, are not product barcodes and will not scan.
Each guide compares types of products — never brands — on ecological impact, labor ethics, and sustainability, and gives each type a verdict: Best Choice, Acceptable Alternative, or Avoid if Possible. Scores are curated estimates for comparing options, not precise scientific measurements, and every guide lists its sources. The app's "How Scoring Works" page, reached from Profile, explains the approach in more detail.
In Profile you can rank what matters most to you — environment, fair labor, animal welfare, cost, durability — and guides re-rank their recommendations to match. You can change your values at any time.
Choices you save are recorded in My Impact with their estimated savings. Your choices live only on your device: there is no account and no cloud backup, so deleting the app removes them.
Buying-guide content refreshes automatically from time to time, so guides can improve without an app update. This needs an occasional internet connection; everything else in the app works offline.
Read the full Privacy Policy.