MyTerms as an Independence Movement
Creating a new digital space in which there is no third party surveillance.
So I’m going into a week of intense work on MyTerms/ IEEE7012 - at VRM Day, Internet Identity Workshop and the Agentic Protocol Workshop. All at The Computer History Museum in Mountain View; as ever an appropriate place for this kind of work. And then multiple working sessions, dinners and drinks around those.
As such, it might be useful for me to write this placeholder that I can point to many times over to give the short version of the philosophy behind MyTerms/ IEEE7012. Or at least my own interpretation of it. Here goes:
The Internet and its various sub-regions (browsers, www, app stores, big AI, IPTV etc) are now very hostile environments for us humans. We have very constrained or negative agency in those places.
We, via our identifiers and our data, are captured and enslaved in a perpetual ‘client-server’ model in which we are only allowed to do what organisations allow us to do.
We check boxes to say that we have read, understood and agreed to all of this; when in fact we have not done any of those things. (a design feature of surveillance capitalism).
We are then subject to ‘optimisation’; and constrained in a model that ensures data about a person is fragmented, and of limited use to the person it relates to.
This model of control is part technical (client-server), but actually more by ‘terms’; those dreaded check boxes, terms of service, and privacy policies (a different one for every organisation).
Regulators have given us that ‘notice and consent, so called data protection’. That may have been a valid model when first introduced in the 1980’s or so; but is now like applying a sticking plaster to an open wound.
That is where are now I’m afraid. So what can ‘MyTerms/ IEEE7012’ do about that?
Personally I think about it as MyTerms creates a new sub-region of The Internet. Like boot-strapping a new country; one that declares independence from its masters because the people don’t like how they are taxed and governed from afar. Except this time we torch the privacy policies rather than throwing tea in the harbour…..
How can MyTerms do that? I think it does so by being, in effect, a governance model for that new sub-region of The Internet, underpinned by technology and standards-backed processes.
In that new ‘independent free state’ (i.e. governed data space), the following will be the case:
Data exchange will be bilateral and transparent, underpinned by standard agreements designed to be equitable, but ultimately written from the individual perspective.
These agreements are contracts, underpinned by contract law; and a valid legal basis for personal data exchange in GDPR. Contracts are signed by both parties to the contract and recorded by agents of each for future reference as needs be.
All things that legitimately need to be done to provide products and services in both private and public sectors are enabled in these contracts…., except
No third party tracking or other form of commercial surveillance is allowed in any of the standard agreements. They do enable and underpin healthy, mutually respecting digital relationships.
So, the overarching belief of the team working on MyTerms is that this new sub-region of The Internet, where no surveillance exists and there is no ‘data lock-in’, will flourish. We believe that ‘free customer’s are better than captive ones. Nitin Badjatia writes brilliantly on that here, and again here. And Doc Searls the same for many years.
We also believe that the smartest, forward looking will organisations will agree. And that they will set up agents in the new space and get on with doing business under more equitable terms.
Companies will open ‘embassies’ in that new state where they can engage with these free customers under MyTerms.
That’s the plan anyway; I’m looking forward to making much progress on that next week. Another update at the end of the week.
This article was also published on SubStack by Iain Henderson.