Ethics Statement

Transparency Statement

Unshittify makes subjective statements about companies, products, and services that:

• Evaluate them for the priorities documented in our Mission Statement and Metrics
• Suggest alternatives that we believe are more aligned with our priorities
• Instruct readers on how to switch to the alternatives we suggest, or leave the originals if they find another alternative they prefer.

When we make evaluations, suggestions, or instructions, we will:

• Provide linked sources where possible
• Indicate where statements are opinion or based on personal experience
• Record whether we personally use the companies, products, or services that we are recommending for or against.

Conflict of Interest Statement

Because we are recommending and direcommending products, we are aware of the potential for conflicts of interest that could degrade trust in our judgement.

As such, at the start of each page, we will disclose when any of the following potential conflicts of interest are relevant:

• Current or prior employment with companies that we assess or recommending, or companies that own the products or services that we assess or recommend.

• An active or prior offer for paid or unpaid sponsorship (e.g. review, free or discounted product, product placement, or similar) regardless of if the offer was accepted. This disclosure will include:

  • Which party (Unshittify or the sponsor) initiated the request or offer
  • Whether the request or offer was accepted or implemented
  • Whether the sponsored content was paid or unpaid
  • Whether the sponsored content was reviewed, approved, or edited by the sponsor prior to posting.
  • Whether the sponsor requested specific language or information in the sponsored content that we included.
• A previous accepted or implemented sponsorship (paid or unpaid, as described above) for another product, service, or company from the same sponsor.
• Any offer for a sponsorship that occurs as a result of unsponsored content.

Additionally, we will have a page listing all past sponsorships available here.

Retraction Policy

Where we retract a recommendation, we will:

• Maintain an archive of the pre-retraction version of the relevant page, with a warning at the top that content may be inaccurate.
• Update the relevant page, and include a link at the top of the page to the archived, pre-retraction version of the page.
• Replace any now-empty pages with notices that indicate that the page was fully retracted, and link to the archived, pre-retraction version of each page.

AI Usage Policy

As always, the priorities from our Mission Statement and Metrics guide our usage of any technology, including Generative AI.

There have been plenty of discussions from plenty of people much more informed than us about the ethical concerns around the use of Generative AI. These concerns include issues we prioritize, such as worker rights, data privacy, and and consumer rights.

As such, in most cases, we will not be using LLMs or other forms of generative AI.

However, we recognize that there may be some situations where an AI model will be the most effective way to Unshittify something.

In those cases, any models we use or recommend will meet the following requirements:

• Truly open source, per version 1.0 of the Open Source AI Definition from Open Source Initiative

  • We will prioritize models with completely open-source and/or public-domain training data, but we will accept models that were trained on unshareable data if and only if all training data was collected and used with affirmative consent of the owners of the data.

• Locally hosted, in our home, on our local network, without needing access to the wider internet

  • This limits the energy usage of the system running the model, and secures our privacy

• Does not replace human creation

  • The models we use will never generate art, journalism, advice, or long-form writing.
• Only used where programmatic algorithms are unsuitable or incapable of the task
• Never used as ground truth for accurate information.