Category: VRM Day

With MyTerms, the person (and their electronic agent) is the first party, and the corporate entity (with its agent) is the second party. This is essential for assuring full respect for personal privacy in the digital world.

Every IEEE standard starts with a PAR: a Project Authorization Request.

Here is the PAR for EEE P7012 (nicknamed MyTerms—much as IEEE 802.11 is nicknamed Wi-Fi). It launched a working group in 2017 (that I now chair), and is expected to go from draft to done by early 2026.

Because what the standard will do is plainly laid out in the PAR, I’m breaking its paragraph into separate sentences to make reading it easier:

This draft standard covers contractual interactions and agreements between individuals and the service providers they engage on a network, including websites.

It describes how individuals, acting as first parties, can proffer their privacy requirements as contractual terms and arrive at agreements recorded and kept by both sides.

These terms shall be chosen from a collection of standard-form agreements in a roster kept by an independent and neutral non-business entity.

Computing devices and software performing as agents for both first and second parties shall engage using any protocol that serves the purpose.

The first party shall point to a preferred agreement, or a set of agreements, from which the second party shall accept one.

Party-to-party negotiations over terms in any of these contracts or other agreements are outside the scope of this standard. If both parties agree, the chosen contract or agreement shall be signed electronically by both parties or their agents.

A matching record shall be kept by both sides in a form that can be retrieved, audited, or disputed, if necessary, at some later time–and which is available to do so easily.*

I can’t share the draft before the final version is published, but I can say that what it says is about as simple as what you read above. It also does not specify what tech or protocol to use. This is to leave development as open as possible.

The main thing is that MyTerms obsolesces notice-and-consent by basing privacy agreements on contracts that individuals proffer as first parties, and sites and services agree to as second parties.

Never mind that this hardly seems thinkable to the status quo. The same was once said of the Internet, the Web, email, and other free and open graces we take for granted today.

Putting each of us in charge of our privacy online is what makes MyTerms the most important standard in development today. But only if we make it so.

If you want to get involved, help us build out Customer Commons, so it can play the same role for personal privacy terms that Creative Commons plays for personal copyright.

*Shall is  IEEE-speak for will or must. The purpose of that rule is to make clear that it does not mean should, could, or any other modal auxiliary verb.