A friend listens, respects your choices, helps you grow, and is there when you need help. A friend doesn't waste your time, track your every move, lock you in a walled garden, or use dark patterns to force you to give up your personal data. I pledge to treat the people who use our products as our friends instead of numbers to optimize, data to exploit, or users that we're trying to get addicted to our product.

I will think about:

  • How can I provide value to people in a way that protects people’s time, privacy, safety, freedom of choice, and well-being, without resorting to data trafficking, exploitation, and short-term hacks?
  • What metrics do we use for people’s satisfaction with our product? Are they vanity metrics that look good on slides but don’t actually mean anything to people using our product?
  • Am I adding a new feature to provide actual value to people, or is it just something that will boost our vanity metrics?

Suggested actions:

  • Apply both the golden rule (treat others as you want to be treated) and silver rule (don’t do to others what you don’t want done to yourself) while keeping in mind that people from different backgrounds from mine have different experiences and needs.
  • Make it easier for people to protect their privacy and stay safe while using our product.
  • Instead of prioritizing time-sucking metrics and driving engagement numbers with mind hacks, aim to delight people and provide value in the shortest possible time so that they can go back to living their lives.
  • Instead of prioritizing growth hacks, focus on building a great product that people can’t wait to recommend to their friends on their own.
  • Remove unnecessary data collection and data tracking, prioritize speaking to actual people.
  • Use open standards and aim for interoperability whenever possible. Make it easy for people to manage and export their data.
  • Be there to help when something goes wrong and respect people’s choice to change their minds and choose a different product.
  • Remove all notifications that primarily serve our business purposes instead of what people actually value.
  • Seek business models and practices that don’t compromise people’s privacy.
  • Build delightful experiences, not Trojan horses with a hidden agenda and dark patterns. Don’t hide Trojan horses in our Terms of Service.
  • Stop forcing people to like and share content on social media platforms when they don’t want to, and reduce our reliance on platforms that trade with people’s privacy.

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