Field notes / Ethics & craft
Defaults are moral decisions
What eight years building for families taught me about the ethics hiding inside a toggle’s default state.
May 2026 · 4 min read
When you build for people who can’t push back — kids, parents at their most anxious, and now patients — you learn quickly that the most consequential decision in a product is rarely the feature. It’s the default.
On Family Link, a setting left on for convenience could mean a server somewhere quietly kept a child’s location history. So we didn’t keep one: no server-side location history for child accounts, by design. That wasn’t a performance tradeoff or a UX preference. It was a statement about what we believed we had the right to know about a kid in the first place.
A default is a position the product takes on the user’s behalf — usually before they’ve read a single word.
That reframes the craft. Putting complex behavior behind a simple toggle isn’t only good interface design; the simplicity is what lets a parent actually understand what they’re agreeing to. A setting nobody can comprehend can’t be consented to. So the work becomes choosing the safe default, then making the architecture — not the help copy — enforce it.
I carry the rule into everything since: start from the person with the least slack, decide what the right default is for them, and make the system hold that line even when the easier path is to ask forgiveness later. In a product people have to trust, the defaults are the ethics — written in code, shipped on by default.