FAQs

MyTerms is a new IEEE standard formally called 7012 Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms. These are terms individuals’ machines—typically computers and mobile devices—proffer as first parties to the machines of organizations such as websites and services as second parties. Both parties use agents, which can be as simple as browser and website add-ons. The terms individuals proffer are contractual agreements expressing personal privacy requirements, plus other terms that should be agreeable to both parties. These might include shopping intentions, willingness to provide data for AI purposes, Data for Good submissions, or other options.

It says what it is. It also reclaims the first person singular pronoun my for persons. Until now it appeared mostly as a prefix for a corporate product or service (e.g. MyFitnessPal, MyChart, MyPlate, MyHeritage) and sound like they’re talking to babies.

MyTerms is an IEEE standard. Many people have participated in the working group that wrote the standard. A few involved from the start are board members of Customer Commons. These are Mary Hodder, Iain Henderson, Joyce Searls, and Doc Searls. Doc is also the person first approached by John C. Havens of the IEEE in 2017 with the idea of starting the workgroup. Scott Mace, an independent journalist, has been the secretary of the working group from the start. Mary is the technical editor and Justin Byrd is the Vice Chair. Doc was the last of three chairs of the working group. First and second were David P. Reed and Lisa LaVasseur. Today, the team implementing the standard includes Kari McMullen (Project Manager) and Nitin Badjatia. What matters most, however, is that MyTerms is an IEEE standard and backed by that organization.

MyTerms should work well for all individuals, and for organisations that are NOT dependent or insistent on surveillance and third party tracking across the Internet and Web.

Privacy policies are a convention that is also a corporate requirement in most places. It is also not binding, and companies can change them in any way and time they like. Consent is typically a ceremony typically involving a notice declaring that using a website or service amounts to approval of tracking, or providing a way to choose what kinds of tracking the person allows or disallows. It too is not binding. There are no easy ways for a person to audit compliance to personal choices made in the consent ceremony, and there is ample evidence that most websites don’t obey those choices anyway. See here and here.

First, because full personal agency is not possible without respect for personal privacy. MyTerms enables that respect. Second, because with MyTerms, the Net and the Web can finally fulfill their original promises to fully support human agency. This is implicit in the “end-to-end” principles that informed their creation and development, and described in The End-to-End Argument in System Design, by J.H. Saltzer, D.P. Reed and D.D. Clark, published in 1981 by the IEEE. It also informed work on MyTerms. In fact David P. Reed was the first chair of the working group.

Many benefits emerge when online relationships between individuals and organisations are grounded with contracts that are transparent, creating more equitable relationships.

MyTerms was born when IEEE 7012 Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms was proposed and approved in 2017. But earlier work began in the last millennium, with the Buyer-Centric Commerce Forum in the UK, and The Cluetrain Manifesto in the US. The ideas directly behind 7012 were worked out in ProjectVRM, which was launched at the Berkman (now Berkman Klein) Center at Harvard in 2006, and its nonprofit spinoff, Customer Commons, in 2013. Customer Commons was created for the express purpose of fulfilling a role that would come to be specified in the standard: to host a roster of standardized personal privacy terms people could proffer as first parties to sites and services as second parties—a role patterned after the successful one established by Creative Commons for personal copyright licenses. The original Customer Commons board includes Mary Hodder, Iain Henderson, Nitin Badjatia, and Doc and Joyce Searls, who were all active in ProjectVRM and earlier work on parallel and allied efforts.

The publication date for MyTerms (IEEE 7012) is 20 January 2026. After that it is available for reading. Work based on it can be done any time.

As the right to be let alone. This definition was established by Louis Brandeis and Charles Warren in their landmark 1890 Harvard Law Review paper, The Right to Privacy.

The digital world is composed of bits and code. That means privacy agreements need to be made explicit, and programmable. MyTerms creates a base for that. Once personal privacy requirements are respected, we can finish civilizing the digital world.

The agreements themselves, when accepted and in place have very few, if any downsides. The only negative in the early days is that it will take time to propagate and not all organisations will adopt them.

There will be 5 agreements when we launch MyTerms, and 8 more in the pipeline. They are of two types: Personal Data Contribution (PDC) agreements are for when a person is providing data on a one off basis. Service Delivery (SD) agreements assume an ongoing digital relationship.

MyTerms is a personal privacy policy, expressed as a contract. And, since the person is the one proffering the contract, it effectively replaces the corporate privacy policy, at least for that person.

In all those cases, the person responds to choices provided by corporate systems. In legal language, persons are second parties, not first parties. With MyTerms, persons are first parties and sites and services are second parties. The person is the one proffering the terms, not the corporate side. MyTerms are also contracts: legal agreements, enforceable by contract law. That makes them binding. In addition, MyTerms requires that both sides keep identical records of their agreement, so compliance can be audited, and disputes adjudicated, should the need arise. All this makes agreements between people and organizations, supply and demand, far more even, equitable, and agentic, than any of those three other options. But there is surely tech involved in those options that might prove useful in development of MyTerms ceremonies and post-engagement auditing of compliance—or measures of progress though relationships built on top of initial MyTerms agreements.

Five reasons: 1. We’re not starting there. Our first targets for MyTerms acceptance are the countless millions of websites and services that don’t participate in the surveillance economy. These are the companies, organizations, and governing bodies that are right now paying to have third parties put meaningless cookie notices on their sites. They can accept MyTerms with no trouble, and find MyTerms agreements a good basis for better relationships as well. 2. It’s early. We are still in the opening decades of a Digital Age that is likely to last for many more decades, centuries, and millennia. 3. History. The giants of telephony and their government partners were all opposed to the Internet until it proved to be unstoppable and to foster countless new forms of success that were in fact prevented by legacy communication systems. 4. Like the Internet, the Web, and other forms of networked public good, MyTerms will prove good for business, simply because free customers in free markets are far more valuable—to the businesses they deal with and to themselves—than what’s possible in the surveillance-based fecosystem we have today. 5. It will be hard for companies to ignore how freely expressed customer intentions are far more valuable than what they currently obtain by surveilled behavior and baited attention. See, markets are about conversations and relationships, not just transactions. By basing conversations and relationships on mutual interest and trust, MyTerms enables better signaling between customers and companies, demand and supply, members and organizations, citizens and governments, than is possible with industrial age systems by which sellers run the show and call all the shots.

First, absence of personal privacy online. Without privacy protections, or even the ability to signal what we prefer—two abilities we’ve had in the natural world since the invention of clothing, shelter, and language—the Internet has turned into a surveillance panopticon. “Notice and consent” fails by providing no assurances at all, and selections in cookie notices are routinely disregarded. MyTerms solves this problem with simple contractual agreements that individuals proffer and are recorded identically by both sides. With full respect for personal privacy as a starting point, we have a substantive base for respectful engagement of many kinds. Second, many businesses depend on locking customers into closed and exclusive membership and rewards programs, which require that customers have no global ways to signal interest or disinterest, to express loyalty, to provide intelligence about product and service usage, or to have ongoing conversations about anything. We call this “captivity commerce.” In this system, every “relationship” i is closed, coercive, and extractive, limiting customer agency to what the company alone provides or allows. Captivity commerce was developed before we had the Internet, the Web, email, and other standard ways for individuals to have scale across many enterprises. By creating a basis for customers and companies to approach each other and engage with full agency, MyTerms invites developing new Net-like and Web-like tools and services for customers to have scale and for companies to build genuine relationships. These relationships can enjoy far more rich and productive forms of value exchange than those we have today.

Many reasons. Here are a few: · There are as many different consent notices as there are websites that post them, making it impossible for individuals to have one way to initiate agreements of their own, or to respond globally and at scale. · All consents are one-sided, and what Friedrich Kessler, in his landmark paper “Contracts of Adhesion: Some Thoughts about Freedom of Contract” (Columbia Law Review, 1943) calls à prendre ou à laisser: take it or leave it. Also, while consents are not contracts, they are adhesive in the way Kessler meant it: the weaker party must adhere while the stronger party can change what it wishes: glue for you, Velcro for them. · Their purpose is to obey the letter of laws such as the GDPR while violating their spirit. · They do nothing to protect personal privacy and are typically violated with impunity. · There is no way for a person to monitor the organization’s compliance, or to dispute noncompliance. · At this point in history (early 2026), consents are widely hated and considered a massive fail.

One reason was that we wanted to learn from and harmonize with other standards already developed through the IETF, the W3C, Kantara, ISO, and de facto market adoption. This took a lot of time. So did the IEEE’s own complexities and formalities—which are both necessary and useful. Two market developments energized us to accelerate work toward the end. 1. The widespread realization, especially in Europe, that notice-and-consent (which you meet with every cookie notice) was a complete waste of money, time, and work for everyone, and that the market was ready for a better approach to obtaining mutual trust at the moment of engagement between any person and any site or service online. 2. New regulatory moves were afoot in Europe and the US. We believe MyTerms will be hugely useful in both places as well as the rest of the world, especially if we get ahead of the curve on those regulatory moves.

It is a group of organisations with various skill-sets and communities that all believe in and benefit from MyTerms being successful. As such the alliance is a pooling of strengths and network to help make MyTerms happen at scale.

MyTerms is a very aspirational project and target; so we are always on the look-out for people with relevant skill-sets and an interest in our subject area? If that is you; drop a note explaining your interest to Contact@myterms.info.

Free commerce, meaning free and open markets. We can’t have those when the popular belief in business is that captive customers are more valuable than free ones. You can hear this belief expressed in the language of marketing, when it speaks of customers as “targets” to be “acquired,” “captured,” “managed,” and “locked in” as if they were slaves or cattle. You can also see the opposite in the success of companies such as Trader Joe’s, which forbids calling customers “consumers,” uses no “gimmicks” (their word) for manipulating customers, and attends no retail trade shows because those are typically about (as their retired president puts it) “screwing the customer.” MyTerms is also not just about freedom from surveillance. It’s also about freedom to express and engage. MyTerms turns respect for privacy and independent agency into a base feature of business relationships, so loyalty can be earned rather than coerced. The enormous overhead of old captivity systems can be reduced or repurposed to much better forms of engagement.

(This is in response to the fourth principle listed here.) It means that both parties have equal access and ability to use personal data shared by the person (the first party) and processed by the organization (the second party). This means data and metadata from and about the person should be accessible to the person, in easily usable forms. We can’t have those when the popular belief in business is that captive customers are more valuable than free ones. You can hear this belief expressed in the language of marketing, when it speaks of customers as “targets” to be “acquired,” “captured,” “managed,” and “locked in” as if they were slaves or cattle. You can also see the opposite in the success of companies such as Trader Joe’s, which forbids calling customers “consumers,” uses no “gimmicks” (their word) for manipulating customers, and attends no retail trade shows because those are typically about (as their retired president puts it) “screwing the customer.” MyTerms is also not just about freedom from surveillance. It’s also about freedom to express and engage. MyTerms turns respect for privacy and independent agency into a base feature of business relationships, so loyalty can be earned rather than coerced. The enormous overhead of old captivity systems can be reduced or repurposed to much better forms of engagement.

The Intention Economy is one that grows around the expressed intentions of customers operating at full agency. It is described in The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge, by Doc Searls, which was published by Harvard Business Review Press, in 2012.