We try to take over responsibility for ethical aspects of software development. For us this means to enable the user to understand the implications of the use of the interface and of how their contributions are stored and represented. They should be able to consent in an informed way. We see this as an important way of acting against data-extractivist services like Facebook and Google. The contradiction of political and subcultural spaces using services that capitalize on private and cultural data was one of the motivations for our project, to provide these spaces with a tool to maintain their own sites of archiving.

The alternatives we are building should actively communicate the political ways of how they are treating users and data differently. Through the interface design and language, we aim to inform those that interact with a cooArchi about what they are doing and what the consequences of it are, so they can consent in an informed way. For example, that others can see what they write, and that they can’t delete it.