I don’t know anything about BashSquare, but the developer is Ahmed Bashbash, a Palestinian software engineer from Gaza residing in Hungary.
Here’s the About page:
As far as what’s on the boycott list, it follows the official boycott list from my knowledge and gives an explanation on why a brand is boycotted
It works without camera access if you have no need to scan barcodes, it does need network to access the boycott list information. It doesn’t need notification or sensor access to work. At least on grapheneos
That’s quite compelling but I still can’t find any official confirmation of that information. The BashSquare website doesn’t mention any employees but does mention the app (and their website is on the G Play store). IMO the information you’ve provided is enough to confirm it uses some of the public boycott list, but could still be omitting things (though very unlikely; that would be a wild Israeli misinformation campaign).
The boycott website doesn’t provide barcode prefixes for companies to boycott, which means there is still some information that isn’t verifiable, and it’s one of the more crucial parts of the app’s functionality (if you’re not scanning barcodes you could just use the website). I did manage to find a way to look up barcode prefixes but there was no mention of a public API so it makes me think that either they’re part of the app (see qualms about open/verifiable dataset) or the app is using some proprietary API/scraper to get that info.
I don’t know anything about BashSquare, but the developer is Ahmed Bashbash, a Palestinian software engineer from Gaza residing in Hungary.
Here’s the About page:
As far as what’s on the boycott list, it follows the official boycott list from my knowledge and gives an explanation on why a brand is boycotted
It works without camera access if you have no need to scan barcodes, it does need network to access the boycott list information. It doesn’t need notification or sensor access to work. At least on grapheneos
That’s quite compelling but I still can’t find any official confirmation of that information. The BashSquare website doesn’t mention any employees but does mention the app (and their website is on the G Play store). IMO the information you’ve provided is enough to confirm it uses some of the public boycott list, but could still be omitting things (though very unlikely; that would be a wild Israeli misinformation campaign).
The boycott website doesn’t provide barcode prefixes for companies to boycott, which means there is still some information that isn’t verifiable, and it’s one of the more crucial parts of the app’s functionality (if you’re not scanning barcodes you could just use the website). I did manage to find a way to look up barcode prefixes but there was no mention of a public API so it makes me think that either they’re part of the app (see qualms about open/verifiable dataset) or the app is using some proprietary API/scraper to get that info.
Thanks for the info!