For journalists, customers, workers, regulators
Cite it
Name a harm precisely, with a number anyone can look up.
“Signing up takes one click online, but cancelling needs a phone call: OES § 2.1.1. It breaks the Autonomy principle.”
An open standard · 8 principles · 804 named practices
A shared ethical standard for businesses that respect people.
Eight principles for how any business should treat its customers, workers, and communities, and 804 named practices that break them, from hidden fees to unsafe workplaces.
- A design app shows a cancellation fee only after you tap Cancel plan.
- A flashlight app asks for your contacts, location, microphone and photos.
- A hotel advertised at $129 a night adds resort, destination and service fees at checkout, for a total of $436.98.
- A support chat answers a refund request with an unrelated article, and won’t connect you to a person.
For any industry: airlines and hospitals, construction and retail, employers, supply chains, and software.
Ways to use it
For owners, teams, buyers, investors
Assess a business
Work through each principle and the practices under it. Every practice has a plain description and examples from many industries, so it fits a clinic as well as a cloud company.
Start with the principlesFor developers
Apply it to software
The OES MCP lets your AI coding assistant review a project against the principles. It runs on your machine, and findings never leave it.
claude mcp add --scope user open-ethics-standard -- npx -y open-ethics-standard-mcp@latestGet the MCP for your assistant →
What the OES is not: a law, a certification, or a compliance checklist.
Free to share and cite under CC BY-ND 4.0.