IEEE 7012-2025—Standard for Machine-Readable Personal Privacy Terms—the standard nicknamed MyTerms—is forty-seven pages long, but relatively concise as standards go. Still, it has a lot of words: over twenty thousand, including a long stretch of IEEE boilerplate up front. But the MyTerms idea is what the name says: My Terms. As with RSS—Really  Simple Syndication—the name says it all.

Boiled down, MyTerms is about just  four things:

  1. The terms are yours.
  2. You are the first party proffering those terms. Services (websites, apps, companies, service providers, whatever) are the second parties.
  3. The terms are contracts, and backed by contract law.
  4. Both parties keep identical records of the agreements they make.

The standard also says agents act for both parties. These can be as simple as browser and server plugins, or as complex as two highly capable and informed AI agents on both sides.

And it says terms the person proffers should be among a few choices posted on the Web by a neutral nonprofit: one that would do for personal contracts what Creative Commons does for personal copyright. We created Customer Commons to be exactly that.

It is interesting now to see the MyTerms idea start to become current in the world, especially as developers start thinking through how personal AI might put MyTerms to use. In no order of priority, here are some of the developments we’re seeing:

That’s off the top of my head and scattered notes. Please tell me what I’ve missed and I’ll add them.

And please read what Nitin Badjatia and Iain Henderson have been writing about MyTerms. A lot there too.