Ethical consumption? There's an app for that. Digital technologies and everyday consumption practices.

Ethical consumption mobile phone apps are increasingly popular. These apps allow consumers to scan the barcodes of products they are considering purchasing and determine whether or not they align with their ethics. App technologies are often applauded for their potential to provide consumers with targeted, crowd‐sourced information about products while shopping and to foster more political, and less individualistic, consumption practices by connecting users to one another and to campaigns. There is a growing field of scholarship conceptually examining the role of information and digital technologies in ethical consumption. However, there is little empirical research on how consumers engage with ethical consumption apps in everyday ways. Drawing on an in‐depth study with 21 participants, this paper explores how app use mediates people's experiences of ethical consumption. We contend that the app design structures and limits how individuals engage in ethically motivated consumption and influences their conceptualizations of ethical consumption as a political practice. We conclude by illustrating that critically examining what it means to be "ethical" in a digital world is a crucial area of research for geographers, particularly as these ethics play out through the everyday use of mobile technologies. Key Messages: Ethical consumption mobile phone apps digitally mediate users' everyday shopping experiences and affect what products they buy and where they shop.Users interact with crowd‐sourced information on the app in nuanced and complicated ways and often feel emotionally drained from the labour involved.Ethical consumption scholars must pay attention to app design, technologies, and use to better understand how "ethical" is mediated through practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]