MyTerms is Status Go toward markets based on full personal agency. Adtech is a $trillion Status Quo based on full agency by corporate entities alone and full subordination of the persons who depend on them: a one-sided power asymmetry manifest in every cookie notice.
But, while it is easy to characterize MyTerms as a way to flip the script on cookie notices, and to imagine hordes of people fed up with surveillance storming the walls of Business-as-Usual, the smarter and simpler approach for MyTerms is to start with the millions of websites and services that aren’t part of the Ye Olde Fecosystem.
Meanwhile, on the regulatory front, officials concerned about personal privacy and mindful of the consent system’s failures, typically continue to look for ways to fix things from the corporate side, because that’s where all the power is. It is hard to imagine that people are more than “data subjects,” and can be just as capable as companies to act as first parties in privacy agreements.
So we have two challenges on our hands. One is to get MyTerms implemented where the surveillance fecosystem doesn’t operate. The other is to remind regulators that contracts are laws that any two parties can make for themselves. And that enforcement can happen inside the framework of plain old contract law (plus plain new ODR—Online Dispute Resolution).
We don’t need a fix for consent that strengthens the status quo and prevents MyTerms from making operative Art. 6 GDPR 1.(b), which specifies contract as one of six grounds for lawful processing of personal data.
Bonus link: The Case for MyTerms.
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