Ethics

Planet’s Ethical Principles

Planet is a mission-led public benefit corporation whose founding purpose is to use space to help life on Earth. By imaging all of Earth’s landmass every day, and making global change visible, accessible and actionable, we seek to accelerate humanity toward a more sustainable, secure, and prosperous world.

Planet is committed to operating as an ethical company in all dimensions of our operations, including those involving our employees, our business practices, and the products we make and sell. We believe doing so allows us to operate with integrity, build innovative technologies and team culture, attract loyal customers, partners, and suppliers, and achieve a positive global impact.

In addition to Planet's Code of Business Conduct and Ethics, which is published here and mandated for all employees, Planet seeks to ensure that data, products and services be used, both internally and externally, in a manner consistent with the following ethical principles:

1. Maintaining the Integrity of our Data and Analytics

   Planet endeavors to be an indispensable, trusted source of truth regarding our changing world. As such, we strive to uphold the objectivity, veracity and scientific integrity of our data and analytical products, and to identify and eliminate any bias or manipulation in their production.

2. Promoting Access and Non-Exclusivity

   Planet's Earth observation data provides a wide array of social goods. It helps humanity understand the systems that shape life on the Earth and behave in a more sustainable manner, and provides the transparency that can lead to greater peace and security.

   Democratizing access to timely, truthful information enables more effective stewardship of the Earth.

   As such, we endeavor to make Earth observation data as widely available as possible. This includes a commitment to providing significant volumes of data at low or no cost to select scientific and nongovernmental organizations, human rights actors, journalists, and others. Furthermore, we undertake measures to ensure no single customer monopolizes the capacity of our fleet of tasked satellites, in any region of the world. We retain a commercial fleet to support tasking requests from all customers, and we continue to support the building of a variety of widely-available digital public goods derived from our data, for the shared benefit of all.

   Other than as restricted by law or these ethical principles, we ‘default to yes’ in making Planet’s data accessible in our archive, on a non-exclusive basis, to all who can benefit from them. Exceptions include data produced by customer-owned constellations or which are otherwise directly downlinked by our customers.

3. Fostering Responsible Use

   In addition to observing all relevant international, US and EU laws, Planet makes reasonable, good-faith efforts to review prospective customers, partners, and suppliers, and to evaluate the potential downstream usage of our products. We seek to understand the intended chain of custody and proposed usage of our products, to screen for unethical or illegal uses, and foster their responsible use. In circumstances in which Planet builds and/or operates satellites for third parties, we apply additional levels of ethical review.

4. Encouraging Transparency and Explainability

   We ensure that our data, products, and services are clearly and publicly documented, in plain language, so that anyone may understand how they contribute to decision-making.

5. Upholding Human Rights and Humanitarian Action

   Planet has a deep respect for the fundamental rights that apply to all human beings, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, race, age, gender or gender identity, religion, disability, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, or political beliefs.

   We encourage the use of our products and services in a manner that is consistent with the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the international covenants in which these rights are enshrined. We apply additional levels of analysis in circumstances where we believe these risks may be amplified.

6. Protecting our Environment

   At Planet, we recognize our universal ethical obligation to safeguard the flourishing of life on Earth, now and for future generations.

   We actively develop and support uses of our data, products and services that address the critical planetary crises of our time, from climate change to the loss of nature. We also seek to reduce our own environmental impacts, both on the ground and in space. We promote efforts to both ensure the safety of, and reduce the impacts of the human energy system, ranging from monitoring energy infrastructure and emissions, to encouraging a transition to more sustainable sources of energy.

   We apply additional levels of analysis to uses of our data, products and services where we believe environmental risks may be elevated. Accordingly, because the rapid reduction in the use of coal as a fossil fuel has been identified by the global scientific and policy community as a key to stabilizing climate change, we have elected not to support uses of our data, products and services whose primary purpose is additional coal extraction.

7. Advancing Peace and Security

   Among its other customers, Planet proudly works with national governments, international governmental organizations, and their defense and intelligence agencies. We believe that the enhanced situational awareness that our data provides improves decision-making. It may contribute to reducing the possibility and severity of conflict, strengthen defense and deterrence, and increase accountability; all of which amount to improving the prospects for and durability of international peace and security. Planet believes making accurate and trusted data widely available results in less overall suffering for people and less harm to our planet.

   When contracting with governments, including defense and intelligence actors, we will seek to ensure that they are subject to oversight and control by an internationally recognized government, and signatories to relevant international treaties such as those governing the conduct of war (including Geneva Conventions) and human rights. We reserve the right to suspend or terminate contracts where we have reason to believe that Planet’s imagery may be used for the intentional targeting of civilians or the indiscriminate use of weapons. Planet reserves the right to make such a determination upon review of available sources of information.

   Consistent with our other principles, Planet endeavors to work with customers in this sector with strong track records in the adherence to the rule of law, and international human rights standards.

8. Respecting Privacy

   Planet values our customers’ and users’ privacy and trust, and we pursue a policy of privacy by design, in accordance with our published Privacy Policy, which can be found here.

9. Encouraging an Ethical Culture, Processes and Partnerships

   We believe ethical systems live and die in the culture of their organizations. Building an ethical organization requires continuous learning processes, as our products and services mature. We commit to training every one of our employees regarding our ethical principles and practices. We also commit to having robust, clearly documented and consistent processes for submitting ethical cases for review (anonymously or not) and for evaluating and deciding such cases in a timely manner.

   Where possible, we seek to align with partner organizations that maintain similar ethical principles, processes and perspectives. And ultimately we are committed to increasing both the transparency and independence of our ethical review processes, and ensuring we are balancing a wide array of internal and external viewpoints.

   Finally, we strive to constantly improve our ethical processes, based on our evolving capabilities and circumstances, and learning from the best practices from other organizations. We commit ourselves to sharing what we learn, and encouraging all organizations to ethically advance society’s interests.