26 Apr 2026 Search

Previously: personal AI in the rugpull economy (VRM Day 2024)

VRM Day is coming up. Doc Searls writes,

Your present isn’t private. Not in the digital world. Not while you always agree to their terms, and not them to yours.

With MyTerms, they agree to your privacy terms.

That makes a lot of sense. Fewer possible sets of terms means less overhead for everyone.

Remember all the similar but often incompatible licenses that popped up in the early days of the corporate open source software trend? Now we’re (mostly, ZFS is still a pain, because reasons) down to a few standard licenses. It’s much easier this way. A developer can save mental swap space and track a few sets of license terms, or even do what I did for one project and treat anything with a license as if it were GPL and include it in the corresponding source release (which automatically built when the release did, so didn’t require any extra work once I got it into the build system).

MyTerms, if successful, will do for customer/supplier relationships what standardized software licensing did for software dependency relationships. Most companies need a vanity privacy policy and ToS about as much as they need a vanity software license.

But what’s the path from here:

to there:

  • a few standard MyTerms options

  • finally practical to get pretty close to the terms you want, whether those terms are “no cross-context tracking” or something like what Rewarded Interest offers, a sort of Green Stamps for tracking data.

  • fewer losses to fraud, more win-win deals

  • compliance tax cuts and lower transaction costs for all

Let’s go back to what Doc wrote.

With MyTerms, they agree to your privacy terms.

Doc is such a nice guy that he doesn’t include the “or else.” So I can come up with one here.

With MyTerms, they agree to your privacy terms, or else they don’t get your data—because you use every habit, technical, and legal power you can to protect it.

Without credible (and measurable, but that’s another story) protections, the BATNA for MyTerms is just the old, one-sided ToS, written by the company’s lawyer. So there’s no motivation to put scarce decision-maker attention into even considering MyTerms. The sad part is that most corporate privacy policies and ToS are just a list of whatever creepy stuff their lawyer’s other clients got caught doing, so the lawyer makes the documents as creepy as possible just to cover possibilities that might not happen. In practice, legit companies would be better off with MyTerms. When normal sites pass tracking data to Google and Meta, they’re training ML to better match scam ads with people more likely to fall for them, and a customer who loses money to a scam doesn’t have that money to spend on real products and services.

But without the “or else” there’s no energy to kick the system from today’s low-trust, high crime status quo into the MyTerms happy place. Trying to use MyTerms as an individual, when the surveillance economy keeps running as usual, is like trying to sell a sack of soybeans out of the back of your truck in front of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

The MyTerms starter pack needs to include not just the actual MyTerms implementation, but also a reliable set of privacy tools, habits, and patterns of interaction as a customer and as a citizen. Privacy is the opposite of “personal” and can’t be hacked into being in isolation.

More: paleoenshittification and a path to adoption for MyTerms