Now I shall demand the cookies! Proposed new browsing agreement turns the tables and lets users dictate terms to websites

Every time you visit a website, you’re essentially entering an agreement over a share of information. The site will give you the page you’ve asked for, and in return you’ll provide some personal data. It might just be browsing cookies, but with the rise of targeted advertising these unspoken deals are getting more and more one sided on who gets the value. There are ways of mitigating this, like this woman who successfully sued Facebook over ad tracking, but in the digital age, there has to be a better way.

MyTerms is the nickname given to a document drafted by internet freedom advocate Doc Searls. According to ArsTechnica, this Draft Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms is a new way of forging these basic terms in our internet browsing. Instead of loading up a page and having an individual agreement, a user can preset what they’re comfortable with and have that be the base that all online interactions adhere to.

The idea is based around putting the user first in these agreements, as opposed to the website. As such the user defines the terms of interaction, and a site can respond to that. If a site decides it needs more permissions than what a user has set in their MyTerms agreement, it can ask and go from there.

Now this could just lead to the same problem we have now. You open a website and it immediately demands permissions to function that are outside of the general terms. A bit like how often you’ll need to agree to cookies. But putting the user first at least allows the baseline to be established by you, not the website. Then in asking for more permissions the site would have to let you know exactly what it wanted from you, rather than simply taking.

The document has been being worked on since 2017 and a full version should be out later. If widely adopted the pressure could also lead to users prefering sites that adhere best to the document. If a series of sites that are chill about these permissions gain popularity thanks to the ease of use this will encourage more to follow suit.

Still, it seeps a utopian expectation in a world where we are most certainly the product.

Giving this control to the human users will hopefully also grow their understanding. Currently, we have a system where most people will just click through blindly saying yes to various permissions, pretending to have read user documents longer than my driveway every time. The plan is to use things like customer commons (modeled off creative commons) as a baseline, which even with limited understanding definitely feels more trustworthy than just whatever a particular site wants to ask for.

Plus, if we’ve made the choices as to what we allow first, we have half a shot of knowing what it contains.