Addresses should create an interconnected, informed, and equitable society. To promote this, `Where` is guided by ten ethical address principles.
Purpose
The principles guide how `Where` addresses are created, updated, removed, and made accessible. It is also a guide developers can use to guide their thinking when working with addresses. Address users can use this statement to understand how we integrate ethical considerations into our solutions.
Principles
- Addresses are for All people
People should not need a high level of technical literacy to use addresses. Address access technologies should behave consistently and intuitively. We will build internationalization and localization capabilities into our specifications and websites, including support for different languages.
We’ll support geographical and cultural adaptation to make addresses accessible to everyone regardless of gender, tribe, or culture. We will accommodate people on low bandwidth networks and with low-specification equipment.
The address access platforms we use to create must be accessible to people with disabilities, including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, language, learning, and neurological disabilities.
- An address does not cause harm to society
When creating and making addresses accessible, we will work to prevent or mitigate any harm they might cause society or groups, especially vulnerable people. We consider a range of threat models that account for abuse scenarios at different scales, from societal to interpersonal.
- Community members priority
If a trade-off needs to be made, we’ll always put community needs above all.
We will prioritize potential benefits for communities over potential benefits to web developers, organizations, or others in the ecosystem, in line with the priority of constituencies.
We commit to learning about and understanding diverse perspectives. We will strive to reflect respect for that diversity in the addresses we create so that our designs properly respect the interests and views of all of the people who might be affected by them.
- Addresses will support communities in transforming innovations
Free address API for startups and SMEs is crucial in spurring innovations and promoting the growth of e-commerce. It is also crucial for promoting the use of our API by students who are upskilling or learning how to create address-reliant solutions.
We will prioritize equal adoption by providing support, tutorials, documentation, and any other materials that can promote address API use by startups, SMEs, and students.
- Addresses enhance individuals’ control and power
We recognize that address technologies can be used to manipulate, harass, and deceive people. We seek to mitigate against these potential abuses and patterns when providing access to addresses and avoid introducing features that increase the chance of people being harmed in any way.
- Reliable address access
We recognize that addresses are utilized to provide critical emergency services to communities. We’ll provide reliable address access by deploying a decentralized architecture, minimizing single points of failure and single points of control. We will also ensure we provide adequate notice in cases where critical upgrades are expected to cause downtimes.
- Addresses should promote environmental sustainability
Address technology may have overall positive and negative environmental impacts, which can change over time and vary geographically. We will endeavor not to do further harm to the environment when creating addresses or introducing new features.
We will keep in mind that people most affected by the environmental consequences of new technologies may not be those who benefit from the features introduced. This includes but is not limited to lowering carbon emissions by minimizing data storage and processing requirements and reducing electronic waste by maximizing the lifespan of physical devices through backward compatibility.
- Addresses are transparent
Addresses are created based on the equality principle; an algorithm objectively generates addresses, and numbers cannot be altered to suit one individual’s needs. We will always ensure a clear sequence in how the addresses are created to ease understanding them in a bigger context. Furthermore, we will always ensure it is possible to audit and inspect addresses and underlying software for security, privacy, or other considerations.
- Addresses can be consumed in any way that people choose
People must be able to use addresses according to their needs. For example, people should be able to easily scan, save, and share their addresses whenever they want. We will build features and write specifications that respect peoples’ personal freedom.
- Addresses APIs will always be multi-browser, multi-OS and multi-device
We will not create address technologies that encourage the creation of applications that work only in one browser or only on particular hardware. We expect that content provided by accessing a URL should yield a thematically consistent experience when someone is accessing it from different devices. The existence of multiple interoperable implementations enables competition and, thus, a variety of choices for address users.