MyTerms is both a privacy signal and a privacy agreement. Moreover, it is a contractual one, and backed by plain old contract law.

As conversations about MyTerms grow more vigorous and expand across business, policy circles, and the academy, two big questions are starting to come up. There are surely more, but le’ts focus on the first two:

  1. Why will businesses agree to MyTerms? Meaning: How will MyTerms be good for them? And what are the incentives?
  2. How does MyTerms harmonize with GPC (Global Privacy Control) and GPP (Global Privacy Platform/Protocol)?

Here are some answers to #1:

  • MyTerms replaces guessing with asking.
  • The shortest path to trust is agreement.
  • The best personalization happens by customer invitation rather than presumed or grudging consent.
  • The best customer data is volunteered, not harvested.
  • Businesses win when customers arrive with clear intentions.
  • The best terms are ones that work for both customers and companies.
  • Privacy is cheaper than surveillance.
  • MyTerms turns personal privacy from a bug (the surveillance view) into a feature.
  • Trusting customers reveal better information than tracked ones.
  • The best agents working on both sides can do more when full trust is established.
  • Far more product and service improvements are possible when abundant market intelligence flows both ways.
  • Free customers are more valuable than captive ones (a claim that has been our mission to prove since day one, almost twenty years ago)
  • Accepting MyTerms gives sites and services more flexibility than they would have now inside the surveillance fecosystem toward which privacy policies have and the GPC have tried to fight and the GPP works to sustain.

To answer #2,  GPC is a simple signal sent by a browser to a website, while GPP is the adtech industry’s (IAB’s) protocol for encoding and carrying personal choices downstream to publishers, ad networks, and other participants in the weird world of pre-MyTerms privacy signaling,  By design, GPP is meant to carry consents rather than contracts, but so far I can’t see any reason the GPP can’t carry information about contracts as well, even though MyTerms excludes or obsolesces the whole surveillance-based adtech fecosystem.

Here is a chart that might help:

Protocol / Standard Origin / Layer Primary Role
MyTerms (IEEE 7012) Personal Agency Layer Defines machine-readable contracts proffered by the individual to a site/service before further engagement. These contracts, aka agreements, support genuine and binding privacy commitments and bases for mutually respectful and trustful interactions from that point forward.
GPC (Global Privacy Control) Browser Layer A simple, binary universal opt-out signal sent in HTTP headers or DOM properties expressing “Do Not Sell/Share My Data.”
GPP (Global Privacy Protocol) Ad-Tech / Vendor Supply Chain An encoding and transport framework that ingests signals (including GPC) and translates/transmits them to ad networks and third parties. It might also carry signals that specify MyTerms privacy agreements made by services with individuals

I haven’t added any links yet, because I want to make sure I have all this right first