Yesterday, Customer Commons and MyData Global launched MyTerms at a London event correctly titled The Only Way to Get Real Privacy Online. (I explain only and real at that link.)
MyTerms is the nickname for 7012-2025 – IEEE Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms. Links:
- The home page. Note the little unlock symbol on the left, next to the word “free.” That’s because MyTerms is part of—
- The IEEE’s GET Program for AI Ethics and Governance Standards. Below is the 7000 series of standards, of which MyTerms is the latest one. All are free.
- The published standard, finally available to anyone. It’s easy to navigate if you click on the outline symbol in the left panel.
The text of the standard has a lot of prerequisite formal stuff up front. Here are the main parts:
- The Introduction, starting on page 8.
- Sections 4 and 5, starting on page 14.
- The top Annexes, starting on page 21
Note that the Introduction and the Annexes are informative, meaning not part of the standard itself. Between them is the normative, or operative, part of the standard.
The standard itself is simple. Here is a diagram that predates the one in the standard, but says the same thing:
This is how it works:
- The person, acting as the first party, proffers an agreement to an entity (website, service, or organization of any kind), acting as the second party. The agreement is a contract. Note that the person here is neither a “user” nor a “client,” but rather a self-sovereign human being operating at full agency.
- The agreement chosen is one of a short list posted at the website of a neutral nonprofit, such as Customer Commons. This is on the Creative Commons model. MyTerms is to personal privacy agreements what Creative Commons is to personal copyrights.
- On the Creative Commons model, agreements are readable by ordinary folk, by lawyers, and by machines. MyTerms addresses the third of those.
- This ceremony is conducted by agents on both sides. These agents can be as simple as browser and web server plugins, or as fancy as personal and corporate AIs. The standard leaves these choices open.
- Both parties keep identical records of the agreement, for compliance auditing and dispute resolutions, should those needs arise
- The first party can also keep a record of which second parties passively or actively don’t agree.
Obviously, this obsolesces cookie notices, and establishes much more solid grounds for relationships between people and organizations, customers and companies, demand and supply.
If you want to dig wider and deeper, here are three textual sources:
And here is the MyTerms video collection at YouTube. We have two so far:
- Yesterday’s event in London and online
- A five-minute background on MyTerms, explained by yours truly
- While listed elsewhere, The Case for MyTerms is a talk I gave last November at Indiana University as part of our salon series there.
There will be more. I look forward to not being able to keep up with all of it.
If you want to get involved, Customer Commons is forming the MyTerms Alliance. More at that link.
If you want to join the conversation space out of which both Customer Commons and MyTerms were spawned, join the ProjectVRM mailing list, which has been going since I set it up as a new fellow of the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard in 2006. The entire archive is here. And we thank the BKC for its extreme patience with what began as a one-year project. 🙂
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