MyTerms is for our Children
We have a moral responsibility to ensure they do not suffer a lifetime of surveillance
I wrote a couple of weeks back that MyTerms, aka IEEE7012, can be seen as an independence movement; and indeed it is. We must free ourselves from the currently enshittified web and Internet.
But there is a more important point in retrospect. MyTerms must also be seen as a mechanism through which our kids can grow up with the massive benefits that digital technology and connectivity WITHOUT the shockingly bad bits that they also have now.
I look at my own two kids. On the one hand, both are very digitally savvy. My 16 year old son (Gen Z) came over to Internet Identity Workshop with me a couple of weeks back and had a great time. That was ostensibly as work/ life experience, and part as a helper at the conference. But it quickly became apparent via him, and other youngsters that were helping out at the event, that they have voices that must be heard on this subject. Indeed he and one of his new friends gate-crashed an IIW session on a kids/ Internet type subject and made the point ‘presumably you’d like our input?’. They did i’m told, and all parties learned from it. So that’s the upside.
The downside, he has grown up in a world full of surveillance. Google Classroom, Snapchat, ‘Insta’. All handled ‘in compliance with regulations’, so far as I can see; but he has grown up in a world of school reports via BI tools, check boxes, terms and privacy policies that are never read, the complete ability to route around weak age restrictions (‘check here to confirm you are over xx’). Next he’ll be learning to drive - black box insurance et al.
I can just imagine all those marketing campaigns queued up now; ‘17th birthday you should buy xxx, 18th…, great you can buy it all….’. Life event after life event being watched and re-sold in the name of consent and legitimate interest. Imagine, then another 80, 90, hopefully 100 years of surveillance. No thanks. It’s immoral. And when it starts under 16, illegal. It takes the concept of ‘customer lifetime value’ to a ludicrous end point.
And then my daughter, 14, and a proper ‘Gen Alpha’. Very clued up, on AI in particular. I asked her to build me a ‘MyTerms image with a fork in the road’. Literally two minutes later she came back with this. Vastly better than I would have managed.
But, savvy or not, they and all the other kids out there are being brought up in a very hostile digital environment. And faced with an endless stream of risks, some of them too horrible to contemplate.
So where does MyTerms fit in that mix? That’s actually really simple. MyTerms agreements mandate transparency, data minimisation and purpose limitation. Thus, ethical services that have a young audience would really benefit from standardising via MyTerms. Imagine not having to wrestle through vast terms of service and privacy policies just to try to understand what is happening under the hood of the app or site - far less be able to do anything about it. It should then be extremely easy to identify kids focused apps that do NOT enable MyTerms. Those that don’t want or can’t handle transparency, data minimisation and purpose limitation….
Personally I’d have them banned from the app stores.
Then…, before I finished this post, I happened to be on a call with some friends at IEEE who pointed me to some great and complementary work already done in IEEE2089. That’s an ‘IEEE Standard for an Age Appropriate Digital Services Framework Based on the 5Rights Principles for Children’. And then IEEE2089.2, which I think is still a work in progress but described in its introduction as ‘The standard defines processes and practices to develop terms and conditions that help protect the rights of children in digital spheres.’.
That does, to me anyway, feel that over and above MyTerms, there are a whole range of ways to improve privacy and safety for kids online. Not before time.
This article was also published on SubStack by Iain Henderson.