Someone spilled hypocrisy on aisle five

AS HE applied sunscreen to his young daughter’s face, Dara O’Rourke, a professor of environmental and labour policy at the University of California, Berkeley, found himself wondering if the lotion was safe. He realised there was no readily available answer. The result—two years, a team of chemists, lots of testing and a chunk of venture capital later—is GoodGuide.com. Launched in 2008, this is a website and smartphone app that rates 140,000 consumer products (currently only in America) according to their safety, environmental sustainability and the ethics of the firms that make them. Now GoodGuide has created a new “purchase analyser” app designed to inform consumers not just about the values embedded in products, but also about whether they are the virtuous shoppers they say they want to be.Using the new app requires selecting a series of characteristics, which can range from whether the user favours organic products to buying only from firms with a good human-rights record. (It also rates how competitively things are priced, via a...