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Check out the new demo we built for AccountAbility, a project led by Nate Greenslit at the MIT Media Lab. AccountAbility aims to put socially responsible information on online bank statements.

The screen shot on the right shows a google map inserted into a bank statement. The first goal is to provide feedback to consumers. In addition to showing merchants of current purchases, similar merchants that meet a user’s social responsibility goals are also shown. This can help with both awareness and tough decision making:

• Maybe there is a shop within walking distance that one didn’t realize rated so highly.
• Maybe it is OK to go a little further out of one’s way to find a shop that supports local farmers or fair trade.

AccountAbility is a hopeful collaboration with the Bank of America through the Media Lab’s Center For Future Banking. What with growing consumer concerns over social responsibility and the economy, now is a great time to offer consumers more, such as tracking the social responsibility of purchases and rewarding consumers and companies for doing good.

I don’t expect this capability to be embed in bank statements overnight, especially with the challenges of data collection still present. The demo makes use of Bilumi’s API to get ratings and display a google map. If you’ve made a lot of chocolate purchases then you’ll get good results. Otherwise, the demo displays fake data !! That’s not so good, in fact my heart hangs heavy for it, but it is just a demo. The demo’s purpose right now is to look pretty and inspire more effort.

The bank statement domain has its own data challenges. First, only merchants are shown, not purchases. Purchases do support merchants, especially brand merchants, but we are left with a mystery over who manufactured the products and how far they were transported.

Furthermore, we don’t know much about the merchants. Where are merchants located? How can we find out what they sell so that we can lookup other merchants nearby that might have better scores AND sell similar products?

Nonetheless, it is exciting to build something outgoing and useful on top of our core technology. I imagine rolling out a Firefox extension that inserts social responsibility information into e-commerce sites like Amazon.com so that customers can better judge what they are buying. The extension could also record online purchases so that users can see whether having socially responsible information handy is making a difference. The extension could insert ratings next to web advertisements, or even append or replace advertisements for one brand with a related but higher rated brand.

Well, enough dreaming. Nothing will happen unless we do something.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 8th, 2008 at 1:09 am by Lucy and is filed under Technology. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.