“MyTerms” wants to become the new way we dictate our privacy on the web

Author, journalist, and long-time Internet freedom advocate Doc Searls wants us to stop asking for privacy from websites, services, and AI and start telling these things what we will and will not accept.

Draft standard IEEE P7012, which Searls has nicknamed “MyTerms” (akin to “Wi-Fi”), is a Draft Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms. Searls writes on his blog that MyTerms has been in the works since 2017, and a fully readable version should be ready later this year, following conference presentations at VRM Day and the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW).

The big concept is that you are the first party to each contract you have with online things. The websites, apps, or services you visit are the second party. You arrive with either a pre-set contract you prefer on your device or pick one when you arrive, and it tells the site what information you will and will not offer up for access to content or services. Presumably, a site can work with that contract, modify itself to meet the terms, or perhaps tell you it can’t do that.

The easiest way to set your standards, at first, would be to pick something from Customer Commons, which is modeled on the copyleft concept of Creative Commons. Right now, there’s just one example up: #NoStalking, which allows for ads but not with data usable for “targeted advertising or tracking beyond the primary service for which you provided it.” Ad blocking is not addressed in Searls’ post or IEEE summary, but it would presumably exist outside MyTerms—even if MyTerms seems to want to reduce the need for ad blocking.