Real Agency and MyTerms
Doc Searls (no relation) writes over at searls.com (which is why this site's domain is searls.co) about how the concept of human agency is being lost in the "agentic" hype:
My concern with both agentic and agentic AI is that concentrating development on AI agents (and digital “twins”) alone may neglect, override, or obstruct the agency of human beings, rather than extending or enlarging it. (For more on this, read Agentic AI Is the Next Big Thing but I’m Not Sure It’s What, by Adam Davidson in How to Geek. Also check out my Personal AI series, which addresses this issue most directly in Personal vs. Personal AI.)
Particularly interesting is that he's doing something about it, by chairing a IEEE spec dubbed "MyTerms":
Meet IEEE P7012, which “identifies/addresses the manner in which personal privacy terms are proffered and how they can be read and agreed to by machines.” It has been in the works since 2017, and should be ready later this year. (I say this as chair of the standard’s working group.) The nickname for P7012 is MyTerms (much as the nickname for the IEEE’s 802.11 standard is Wi-Fi). The idea behind MyTerms is that the sites and services of the world should agree to your terms, rather than the other way around.
MyTerms creates a new regime for privacy: one based on contract. With each MyTerm you are the first party. Not the website, the service, or the app maker. They are the second party. And terms can be friendly. For example, a prototype term called NoStalking says “Just show me ads not based on tracking me.” This is good for you, because you don’t get tracked, and good for the site because it leaves open the advertising option. NoStalking lives at Customer Commons, much as personal copyrights live at Creative Commons. (Yes, the former is modeled on the latter.)
How are the terms communicated? So MyTerms is expressed as some kind of structured data (JSON? I haven't read the spec) codification presented by the user's client (HTTP headers or some kind of handshake?), to which the server either agrees to or something-something (blocks access?). Then both parties record the agreement:
On your side—the first-party side—browser makers can build something into their product, or any developer can make a browser add-on (Firefox) or extension (the rest of them). On the site’s side—the second-party side—CMS makers can build something in, or any developer can make a plug-in (WordPress) or a module (Drupal).
Not answered in Doc's post (and I suspect, the rub) is how any of this will be enforced. In the late 90s, browser makers added a bold, green lock symbol to the location bar to convey a sense of safety to users that they were communicating over HTTPS. Then, there was a lucrative incentive at play: secure communications were necessary to get people to type their credit cards into a website. Today, the largest browser makers don't have any incentive to promote this. Could you imagine Microsoft, Google, or Apple making any of their EULA terms negotiable?
Maybe the idea is to put forward this spec and hope future regulations akin to the Digital Services Act will force sites to adopt it. I wish them luck with that.