Goals of Humane Design. Goals of Humane Design is to create products that:

This sounds good, but to me these points are simply about not breaking the law. Monopolies like Facebook and Google are possibly already illegal. Humane tech is about going a much further in my mind.

Ideally systems should be designed so that all modular parts are easily interchangeable at any time and all data is freely portable and that this portability is frictionless. A good principle is to have at least 3 different providers that users can choose from for each modular part of the service. All data that doesn’t belong to users should be open source / creative commons / public domain. Users should be able to keep their data (for example all posts, photos, messages) on their own “clouds” and backup services of their choosing as well as on their own devices. Services should be completely modular and interchangeable, for example users can easily switch between messaging apps or sites and have all of their messages and contacts ported with them since each user holds her own data on her own chosen cloud provider(s). Services should not have access to any user data unless it is absolutely necessary - user data is served directly from each user’s private cloud(s).

This goes above the basic goals of humane tech and for a reason. If the goals of humane tech are just not to exploit users, then we’re still going to be stuck with the same providers of technology always playing the same ethical game – “It’s ok to do evil, but make it look like we don’t do evil. - Google, Inc.”. So we need to change the system. There have been successes in the past such as Wikipedia killing off Microsoft Encarta. The next steps include Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid and other new Technologies, protocols and standards for a better future Web.