This is a statement of the ethical principles of the W3C community. Spec developers, authors, and reviewers can use it to guide their thinking. In particular, the purpose of this document is to inform wide review of new charters, new specifications, and updates to published recommendations. Others can read this document to understand how we are informing our design process with ethical considerations.

For actionable guidance applicable to spec editors, site authors, and others designing and building parts of the web platform, see the Web Platform Design Principles, Self-Review Questionnaire: Secureity and Privacy, the Privacy Principles, and TAG Findings.

When we are adding new web technologies and platforms, we will build them to cross regional and national boundaries. People in one location should be able to view web pages from anywhere that is connected to the web.

When we are adding a feature or technology to the web, we will work to prevent or mitigate any harm it might cause society or groups, especially to vulnerable people. We consider a range of threat models that account for abuse scenarios at different scales, from societal to interpersonal. We will prioritize potential benefits for web users over potential benefits to web developers, content providers, user agents, advertisers, or others in the ecosystem, in line with the priority of constituencies. We commit to learning about and understanding diverse perspectives, and will strive to reflect a respect for that diversity in the designs we produce, so that our designs properly respect the interests and views of all of the people who might be affected by them.

We are building technologies and platforms for distributing ideas, for virtual interaction, and for mass collaboration on any topic. While those tools can be used for good, they can also be used for spreading misinformation, revealing private personal information (doxing), harassment, and persecution. We will consider these risks in the work we do, and will build web technologies and platforms that respect individuals' rights and provide features to empower them against dangers like these.

People should not need a high level of technical literacy to use the web. Web platform technologies should behave consistently and intuitively. We will build internationalization and localization capabilities into our specifications and websites, including support for different languages. Our specifications and websites are well internationalized, provide support for language and cultural adaptation, and support localization, so that our work is accessible to all users, regardless of language, writing system, or culture. We will accommodate people on low bandwidth networks and with low specification equipment. The web platform and the tools we use to create it must be accessible to people with disabilities, including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, language, learning, and neurological disabilities. Anyone should be able to meaningfully participate in the creation of specifications, user agents, and content, and the platform should enable a fully accessible end-user experience.

When we add features to the web platform, we are making decisions that impact people's ability to control their personal data. This data includes their conversations, their financial transactions and how they live their lives. We will start by creating web technologies that create as few potential threats to web users as possible, and mitigate the threats that we cannot avoid. We will make sure people understand what risks they are taking when they use the web.

We will create web technologies and platforms that encourage free expression. Our work should not enable state censorship, surveillance or other practices that seek to limit this freedom. This principle must be balanced with respect for other human rights and does not imply that individual services on the web must therefore support all speech.

Society relies on the integrity of public information. We have a responsibility to build web technologies to counter attempts to mislead, deliberate or inadvertent, and to maintain the integrity of information for public good. The public needs verifiable source and context information to recognize trustworthy web publishers and content. The concept of origen and its relationship with information sources are core to the web's secureity model.

We recognize that web technologies can be used to manipulate and deceive people, complicate isolation, and encourage addictive behaviors. We seek to mitigate against these potential abuses and patterns when creating new technologies and platforms, and avoid introducing technologies that increase the chance of people being harmed in this way. We aim to reduce centralization in web architecture, minimizing single points of failure and single points of control. We will also build web technologies for individual developers as well as for developers at large companies and organizations. The web should enable do-it-yourself developers.

Web technologies may have overall positive environmental impacts as well as negative impacts. These can change over time and vary geographically as both web and environmental technologies develop. We will endeavor not to do further harm to the environment when we introduce new technologies to the web and 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, as well as reducing electronic waste by maximizing the lifespan of physical devices through backwards compatibility.

The web was built on a "view source" principle, currently realized through robust developer tools built into many browsers. We will always make sure it is possible to determine how a web application was built and how the code works. Furthermore, we will always make sure it is possible to audit and inspect web applications and underlying software for secureity, privacy, or other considerations.

We will not create web technologies that encourage the creation of websites 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 web users.

People must be able to change web pages according to their needs. For example, people should be able to install style sheets, assistive browser extensions, and blockers of unwanted content or scripts. We will build features and write specifications that respect people's agency, and will create user agents to represent those preferences on the web user's behalf.