This Library was created for people.
For readers. For the curious. For people who come looking for a particular story and people who wander in without knowing what they are looking for at all.
If you spend time here, you may eventually choose to tell us something about yourself. You may save something to your Collection, buy a book, attend an event, tell us what you would like to hear about, send Charity a private message, or simply read.
Whatever relationship you choose to have with this Library, we believe it begins with trust.
And we believe trust is precious.
Trust is earned perpetually.
Trust is not ours because you visited this website.
It is not ours because you created an account, bought something, subscribed to something, gave us your email address, or chose to tell us something about yourself.
Trust is earned through actions, over time.
It can take years to build and a single decision to destroy.
We understand that.
So we do not think of your trust as something we own. It is not an asset we can leverage. It is not currency. It is not something we may sell, barter, trade, or spend.
Every decision we make must continue to deserve it.
You are a person, not a product.
Your relationship with this Library is not for sale.
We will not sell your personal information.
We will not rent it, trade it, turn it into advertising profiles, or hand your reading behavior to marketers so someone else can become better at selling things to you.
We will not build this Library around extracting the maximum possible commercial value from your attention.
We may learn from what happens here. We want to understand what people read, what they return to, what they save, what they share, what they respond to, and whether the Library itself is working well.
But there is a difference between understanding people and exploiting what we understand about them.
We intend to remain on the right side of that line.
Capability is not permission.
Technology can increasingly tell us things about people that they never explicitly chose to tell us.
That does not mean we should ask it to.
The ability to collect something is not a reason to collect it. The ability to infer something is not permission to infer it. The ability to influence someone's behavior does not give us the right to manipulate it.
We will not use technology simply because it makes greater surveillance, profiling, targeting, or persuasion possible.
Our standard is simpler:
Does this deserve the trust another human being has placed in us?
If the answer is no, the technology does not get permission.
Technology should work for people here, not work on them.
We believe technology—including artificial intelligence—can make this Library extraordinary.
It can help people find things. Explore ideas. Discover relationships between works. Remember what they wanted to return to. Navigate a Library that may someday contain thousands of things. Make experiences more accessible and useful.
Those are technologies working for people.
We will not knowingly use AI to circumvent protections we would otherwise give you, secretly profile you, manipulate you, or infer sensitive things about you simply because a machine is capable of doing so.
When AI materially affects your information or your experience, we will strive to make its role understandable.
AI does not get an ethical exception because it is AI.
It operates under this Covenant too.
We collect deliberately.
Information should have a reason for being here.
Our rule is:
Need to know, not nice to know.
We will not collect information merely because someday it might be useful.
Where aggregate or anonymous information can reasonably answer the question, we should not require identity.
Where identity is necessary because you have chosen a relationship with us, we should collect what that relationship reasonably requires—not everything technology makes possible.
The safest information we can possess is sometimes the information we never collected.
We will tell you what we are doing.
You should not need a law degree, a computer-science degree, or forty minutes with a privacy policy to understand the basic bargain you are making with us.
When we collect meaningful information about you, we should be able to explain in ordinary language:
- What are we collecting?
- Why are we collecting it?
- How are we using it?
- Who else needs access to it?
If we would be embarrassed to explain a practice clearly, we should reconsider the practice—not hide the explanation.
Your private communication is private.
If you write privately to Charity, you are communicating with Charity.
Your message does not become public content merely because you sent it through this Library.
It does not become a testimonial, marketing copy, a social-media post, or material for publication without appropriate permission.
Opening a private line of communication also does not create an obligation for Charity to respond.
Good-faith communication is welcome here.
Abuse is not.
The Library may restrict someone's ability to interact when necessary to protect Charity, readers, the Library, or others. Those boundaries exist so that genuine human communication can remain possible and safe.
We give third parties a function, not a relationship.
Websites require infrastructure.
Payments must be processed. Messages must be delivered. Information must be stored. Software must run.
That means some trusted service providers may need limited access to information in order to perform a specific function.
But access for a function is not ownership of the relationship.
When we choose a provider, we will take reasonable care in deciding what we entrust to it. We will limit information to what is reasonably necessary for its role, use available safeguards, and reconsider relationships when material circumstances change.
The greater the access we entrust to someone else, the greater the scrutiny that decision deserves.
Convenience alone is not sufficient reason to entrust someone with your information.
And we will not knowingly use a third party to do something with your information that we have promised not to do ourselves.
Outsourcing does not outsource responsibility.
Our commitments follow your information as far as we can reasonably make them follow it.
They govern the technology, AI systems, contractors, service providers, and other third parties we choose to help us operate.
We cannot truthfully promise that we control every action taken by every independent company involved in modern technology.
We can promise to exercise reasonable care in whom we choose, what we share, why we share it, what protections we use, and how we respond when something changes.
If we learn that a provider or technology is operating in a way fundamentally incompatible with the trust we have promised to protect, we will not dismiss that as somebody else's problem.
We will not outsource what we would not ethically do ourselves.
We will protect what you entrust to us.
Perfect security does not exist, and promising it would be dishonest.
But that does not diminish our responsibility.
We will take reasonable technical and organizational measures to protect the information entrusted to us. We will limit unnecessary access. We will design systems with privacy and security in mind rather than treating them as cleanup work after something has already been built.
And when we discover a problem, our responsibility is to respond: understand it, contain it where appropriate, correct it, learn from it, and communicate honestly when circumstances warrant it.
Discovering that something went wrong is not an excuse to hide it.
Safety is something we maintain.
A safe place requires safe infrastructure.
We cannot ask you to trust this space while relying only on good intentions. The systems underneath it must be designed to honor the same commitments we make here.
And that responsibility does not end when a system launches.
Technology changes.
Companies change.
Artificial intelligence changes.
Security risks change.
Our own Library will change.
We will not assume that yesterday's safe decision remains today's safe decision simply because we once approved it.
Trust must be earned perpetually. So must safety.
You control the relationship you choose to have with us.
Reading something here does not silently enroll you in something else.
Buying something does not automatically mean you want marketing from us.
Giving us an email address for one purpose does not automatically give us permission to use it for every other purpose we can imagine.
Where choices about your ongoing relationship belong to you, we will endeavor to make those choices understandable and accessible.
Your curiosity is not consent.
Your attention is not consent.
Your purchase is not blanket consent.
Your presence here is not blanket consent.
We will use what we learn to understand, not manipulate.
We want to know whether this Library matters to people.
We want to understand what resonates. What gets discovered. What people return to. What creates connection. What works beautifully and what doesn't.
That knowledge can help us make this place better.
But measurement serves the relationship. The relationship does not exist to serve the measurement.
We will not intentionally design this Library around addiction, compulsion, manufactured urgency, dark patterns, or exploiting what we learn about an individual person's vulnerabilities.
We can learn without turning the person being understood into something to be optimized.
These promises apply when nobody is watching.
This Covenant is not a description of what we hope the Library looks like from the outside.
It governs how we build it.
New technology, new vendors, new AI capabilities, new business models, new analytics, new features, and new opportunities should be evaluated against these principles.
A profitable opportunity does not receive an exemption.
A convenient technology does not receive an exemption.
An exciting new capability does not receive an exemption.
And an automated system acting on our behalf does not receive an exemption.
The machinery inherits the obligation.
This Covenant can grow. Its principles should not quietly disappear.
We expect this Library to change.
There will be technologies and circumstances we cannot anticipate today. That may require us to clarify this Covenant or add protections we have not yet imagined.
When we make meaningful changes to the promises themselves, we believe those changes should be visible rather than quietly rewritten and forgotten.
This Covenant should become stronger as we learn.
It should not become weaker merely because weakening it becomes convenient.
The promise underneath all the others
We want this Library to be a place where you can feel safe being curious.
That does not mean everything here will be comfortable.
Stories can challenge us. Ideas can provoke us. People can disagree. Something Charity writes may delight you, anger you, comfort you, make you laugh, make you cry, or make you think she's completely wrong.
Safety does not require agreement.
It requires knowing that your presence here will be treated with dignity.
That your curiosity will not be weaponized against you.
That your information will not quietly become someone else's commodity.
That the technology beneath your experience is expected to respect you too.
And that the people and systems responsible for this place understand that trust is precious, priceless, difficult to earn, and extraordinarily easy to destroy.
We cannot demand your trust.
We can only behave in ways that may earn it.
Again and again.
For as long as you choose to come here.
If our technology ever conflicts with the trust you place in this Library, the technology is the thing that needs to change.