Imagine no more cookie notices.
No more surveillance panopticons.
No more creepy adtech.
No more Internet of Nothing But Accounts.
No more privacy in the hands of everybody but you.
Then thank MyTerms for making all those possible, and not just imaginable.
MyTerms will do for personal privacy—
- What the Internet (TCP/IP) does to make each of us peers on a network the world shares
- What the Web (HTTP) does for our ability to publish and share media
- What RSS (really simple syndication) does for our ability to make what we publish easy to find and subscribe to, outside of any company’s silo
We will never get personal privacy from entities that call us “targets,” to “acquire,” “manage,” “control,” and “lock in” after we are herded through a “funnel,” as if we were slaves or cattle.
We will never get personal privacy from cookie notice “agreements” for which we have no way of our own to record what happened, or to audit compliance.
We will never get personal privacy from any system over which we have no personal control.
To control how personal privacy works in the digital world, we need MyTerms.
MyTerms is the nickname for a new standard called IEEE P7012, much as Wi-Fi is nickname for IEEE 802.11. It has been in the works since 2017, and is due to be published on 22 January 2026. I chair the working group that wrote it.
MyTerms describes how the sites and services of the world agree to your terms, rather than how you agree to theirs. It says your agreements with those sites and services are contracts, rather than the empty promises that come when you click on cookie notice “choices.” With MyTerms agreements, both sides store identical records in ways that can be audited and disputed, should the need arise.
With MyTerms, you are the first party. The sites and services of the world are the second parties.
The process is simple: you choose to proffer one among a short list of simple standard agreements kept on a roster maintained by a disinterested nonprofit—on the model of Creative Commons. There will be a number of these sites, for different countries and regions, including Customer Commons here in the U.S.
You make your choice, and the second party agrees or declines, using agents. These can be as simple as browser and server plug-ins, or as complex as AI agents on both sides.
The first five terms are vetted at https://myterms.info. All are agreeable, meaning good for both sides. The most basic one is called SD-BASE, for “service delivery only.” SD-BASE says what you get from a site or a service is what you expect when you walk into a store in the natural world: just their business, whether it be luggage, lunch, or lingerie—and not to be tracked elsewhere like a marked animal or to have information about you sold or handed over to other parties. It also says you will treat the other party with full respect, again as you would in the natural world.
Other agreements cover data portability, data use for AI training, data for good, and data for intentcasting.
In the natural world, we worked out privacy thousands of years ago, starting with the privacy tech we call clothing and shelter. Then we developed agreements with others that were almost entirely tacit, meaning we knew more about them than we could tell, but everyone understood.
Fundamentally, privacy was an expression of what Brandeis and Warren called “the right to be let alone.”
But there is no tacit in the digital world. Everything in the digital world needs to be made explicit: written into code. In the absence of explicit agreements about what privacy is, and how it works, we’re stuck with the tacit understanding by business-as-usual that “the right to be let alone” is a bother, and that following people without their express invitation or a court order is just fine, and worth $trillions.
With MyTerms, we can have $trillions more. That’s because far more interaction is possible when customers have scale, and an abundance of market intelligence can flow both ways between customers and companies. The current all-surveillance fecosystem prevents both.
Lots of tech is possible here, but we need to start with something simple: plugins for browsers and Web servers such as WordPress and Drupal.
If you’re interested in helping make those—or any—MyTerms tools, write to contact@myterms.info. Thanks!