Product doctrine
Resonance without surveillance.
Intelligence that learns with people should not accumulate power over them. Usefulness and human agency must increase together.
01
Twelve product principles
- Resonance without surveillanceLearning must be visible, bounded, purpose-specific, and controllable.
- Capability never grants authorityThe ability to infer, share, publish, spend, deploy, or act does not authorize the action.
- Collect and retain the minimumEvery field needs a necessary purpose and retention boundary.
- Local-first where feasibleCloud services should extend capability, not silently own identity, memory, or work.
- No silent secondary useData provided for one purpose must not quietly become training, advertising, monitoring, or eligibility data.
- Legibility before intimacyA system must not know a person more deeply than the person can understand its knowledge and influence.
- Revocation must be realPeople must be able to refuse, withdraw, delete, export, correct, recover, and leave.
- Reconstruct consequential behaviorImportant actions should preserve privacy-aware evidence of identity, authority, inputs, decisions, and effects.
- Containment over perfect-security promisesReduce the value, reach, duration, and irreversibility of a compromise.
- Flourishing over captureMeasure agency, learning, safety, accessibility, reduced burden, and sustainable value—not dependence.
- Usability is governancePeople must understand authority, uncertainty, failure, and recovery across abilities and technical literacy.
- Evidence before trust languagePrivate, safe, sovereign, encrypted, user-owned, and effective are testable claims—not adjectives.
Boundary
If a product becomes more intelligent by making a person less free, less informed, less able to leave, or more exposed, it violates this doctrine—even when collection is disclosed.