The EU’s new Digital Omnibus proposal aims to update and expand the GDPR, notably with Article 88b, which includes this:

A new Article 88b Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (General Data Protection Regulation), for automated and machine-readable indications of individual choices and respect of those indications by website providers once standards are available.

That was written in June 2025. (I’ve boldfaced the phrases that matter.) We now have a standard for exactly what the EU wants and needs: IEEE 7012-2025—Standard for Machine-Readable Personal Privacy Terms. It is nicknamed MyTerms (much as IEEE 802.11 is nicknamed Wi-Fi) and was published by the IEEE in January 2026 after nine years in the making. Here’s the PDF.

Article 6 of the GDPR lists six bases for the  Lawfulness of Processing:

1. the data subject has given consent to the processing of his or her personal data for one or more specific purposes;
2. processing is necessary for the performance of a contract to which the data subject is party or in order to take steps at the request of the data subject prior to entering into a contract;
3. processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which the controller is subject;
4. processing is necessary in order to protect the vital interests of the data subject or of another natural person;
5. processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller;
6. processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller or by a third party, except where such interests are overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject which require protection of personal data, in particular where the data subject is a child.

I’ve boldfaced the three that matter, and italicised their core distinctions.

The entire adtech business relies on the first and last of these, consent and legitimate interests, as their excuses for tracking people, allowing them to obey the letter of the GDPR while screwing its spirit.

We see consent at work with every cookie notice we click on or click past. And we have no faith that clicks on consent “choices” provide any privacy protection at all. Reasons:

1. Most sites ignore cookie choices.
2. Many sites set cookies even before a cookie choice is made.
3. It’s obvious that adtech is a personalised guesswork business that relies on surveillance, so most of these “choices” are misdirections away from corporate hunger for personal data.
4. We have no record of the “choices” we make (and in many cases, no choice is offered), or any way to audit or dispute compliance.
5. Uninvited and unwanted surveillance is by now so far out of control that cars, TVs, and AI chatbots are all in on the game (and hardly bother with consent notices).

The legitimate interests are advertising and surveillance, which Google, Facebook and the IAB say the world needs, because it funds so much of what happens online.

To the adtech business, personal privacy is a bug, not a feature. The whole business is incentivised to violate privacy, because violating privacy pays. No amount of regulatory oversight will fix that. To adtech, paying fines for privacy violations is just a cost of doing business.

The only fix that will work is what people—customers and citizens—bring to the market’s table. With MyTerms, they can do that.

MyTerms addresses the second of the GDPR’s six legal bases: contract. Put simply, here is what  the MyTerms standard says:

• The person (not a mere data subject) is the first party, and the site or service is the second party.
• The person proffers a contractual agreement chosen from a limited roster posted on the public website of a disinterested nonprofit, such as Customer Commons (which was created to do for personal contracts what Creative Commons does for personal copyrights—and which the IEEE approached with the idea for making MyTerms a standard).
• When the second party agrees, both parties keep an identical record, which supports compliance auditing and dispute resolution. (By preserving evidence, this also creates an infrastructure for dispute avoidance as well.)

The GDPR succeeded by recognising natural persons as holders of rights, but it left intact the industrial age convention in which organisations are the exclusive originators of terms at scale. That’s one reason why persons have remained mere data subjects rather than contractual parties.

Fortunately, the Internet’s base protocols are peer-to-peer. Treating people on the Net as mere “users” and “data subjects” limits their agency. With MyTerms, people acquire a status they yielded when industry won the industrial revolution. (Before the industrial age, surnames—Baker, Müller, Weaver,  Lefebvre, Smith, Marchand, Farmer—signified agency: what people did in the world. That’s just one thing we lost when we became workers, executives, consumers, and users.)

In the natural world, privacy is maintained mostly by tacit agreements. In the digital world there is no tacit, so agreements must become explicit and programmable. This is why contracts are the only way we’ll get real personal privacy in the digital world.

It should also be clear by now that polite requests also don’t work. We tried that with Do Not Track, and by the time it finished failing, the adtech lobby had turned it into Tracking Preference Expression—as if we wanted to be tracked all along.

That main pro-consent lobby is the Interactive Advertising Bureau, or IAB. Among its recommendations for the Digital Omnibus are deleting 88b and  improving consent in various ways, such as  “Revise the proposed stricter consent rules.”

The IAB is blind to the simple fact that people hate being spied on and do what they can to stop it—mainly by turning off ads. By 2015, ad blocking was already the biggest boycott in human history. That boycott rose in direct response to obvious tracking, especially with retargeting. (That’s how one ad or advertiser keeps following you from site to site and app to app.)  And the boycott is much bigger now:

• By Q2 2023, there were 912M active ad-blocking users worldwide, up 11% from Q4 2021. (Source: e/yeo, with more here)
•  1.77 billion people worldwide were blocking ads by Q2 of 2026. (Source: Backlinko, citing DataReportal and e/yeo).
• Privacy-focused browsers (like Brave, Safari, and Firefox) automatically block advertising elements and behavioural tracking scripts by default. This is in clear response to market demand.

The IAB earned all of that. Yet they still see ad blocking and tracking protection as problems to solve rather than clear and constructive signals from the marketplace.

So it should be clear by now that the old brownfield of consent has become a toxic wasteland of surveillance, lost privacy, and minimised human agency—led by an industry that has been hostile to privacy from the start.

In fact, consent is required for what Shoshana Zuboff calls Surveillance Capitalism. That form of capitalism is based on inferred or extracted consent. The only way we can defeat that regime is by re-basing e-commerce on contractual agreements in which customers take the lead. After all, it’s their privacy that needs protection.

The surveillance economy is limited entirely by its methods, which are built around grabbing attention, harvesting data, and guessing at people.

We can replace it with an intention economy that’s based on what customers actually want. The range of those wants far exceeds what companies and their systems can guess at. Far more business, and business improvement, opens up when market intelligence can flow both ways. In the consent/surveillance regime, it can’t, because all relationships are silo’d in sellers’ separate systems, all built to minimize customer interactions, by design. But relationships built on respectful contractual agreements can be far more capacious when those relationships start with forms of mutual trust that whole markets share. That’s what MyTerms makes possible.

Here is a quick outline of some additional benefits.

For customers, the most obvious one is getting rid of cookie notices, which are annoying and not worth the pixels they are printed on.  If a company really does care about personal privacy, it’ll respect personal privacy requirements. This is how things work in the natural world, where tracking people like marked animals has been morally wrong for millennia. In the digital world, however, agreements need to be explicit, so programming and services can be based on them. MyTerms does that.

For business, MyTerms has lots of advantages:

• Reduced or eliminated compliance risk
• Competitive differentiation
• Lower customer churn
• A basis for real rather than coerced relationships
• A basis for better signalling in both directions
• Reduced or eliminated guesswork about what customers want, how they use products and services, and  how both might be improved

Lawyers get a new market for services on both the buy and sell sides of the marketplace. Companies in the CMP (consent management platform) business (e.g. Admiral and OneTrust) have something new and better to sell to enterprises (and perhaps to people as well).

Lawmakers and Regulators can start looking at the Internet and the Web as places where freedom of contract prevails, and contracts of adhesion (such as what you “agree” to with cookie notices) are obsolete.

Developers can have a field day (or decade). Look for these categories to emerge

• Agreement Management Platforms — an evolutionary step forward from consent management platforms.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – Make its middle name finally mean something.
• Customer Data Return (CDR) – Give, sell back, or share with customers the data you’ve been gathering without their permission since forever. Talking here to car companies, TV makers, app makers, and every other technology product with spyware onboard for reporting personal activity to parties unknown.
• Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) Tools and services — a customer hand for CRM to shake.
• Platform Relief –  Free customers from the walled gardens of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and every other maker of hardware and software that currently bears the full burden of providing personal privacy to customers and users. Those companies can also embrace and help implement MyTerms for both sides of the marketplace.
• Personal AI (pAI)– Till and plant a vast new greenfield for countless companies, old and new. This includes Apple (which can make Apple Intelligence truly “AI for the rest of us” rather than Siri in AI drag), Mozilla (with its Business Accelerator for personal AI) , Kwaai (for open source personal AI), and everyone else who wants to jump on the train.
• Big meshes of agents, such as what these developers are all working on.

In the marketplace, we can start to see all these things:

• VRM + CRM will flourish, as described by Iain Henderson (one of MyTerms’ authors) in Towards Network-Based Ecosystems.
• We should expect improvements to digital public infrastructure, as relationships move out of Big Tech’s silos and into distributed relationship frameworks based on the Internet’s base peer-to-peer protocols.
• Predictions I made in The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012) and Tim Berners-Lee made in the Attention vs. Intention chapter of This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025) will finally come true.
• There will be new dances between customers and companies. (“The Dance” is a closing chapter of The Intention Economy.)
• New commercial ecosystems can grow around a richer flow of useful information in both directions, based on shared interest and trust between customers and companies.
• Surveillance capitalism will be obsolesced — and replaced by an economy aligned with personal agency and mutual respect from contractual partners.

And much more.

So it would be helpful for the European Commission to expand its scope from protecting data subjects to empowering first parties. They can do that by welcoming MyTerms in the Omnibus Directive, expanding human agency into a new greenfield where boundless positive outcomes can flourish.

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Drafts of myterms agreements are currently posted at MyTerms.info, which is a project of Customer Commons and MyData Global. You can also read more about MyTerms in writings by Iain Henderson, Nitin Badjatia, and me.

We also invite you to join the ProjectVRM list, where we can converse and collaborate on moving MyTerms forward.

There is no organisation on Earth with a more audacious purpose than this one:

This isn’t shooting for the Moon. It’s shooting for the whole world of business.

What Customer Commons wants to restore isn’t just what was lost when the Internet got real. (For example, privacy.) Customer Commons also wants to restore personal agency that was lost when Industry won the Industrial Revolution. That’s when jobs replaced work, labour replaced teams, and customers became consumers.

That last shift, Jerry Michalski explains, was from human beings to “gullets with wallets and eyeballs.” After that shift, freedom of contract in marketplaces was enjoyed only by businesses. Not by gullets.

Customer Commons was created to change that. It was spun out of ProjectVRM as a 501(c)3 nonprofit in 2013, shortly after Harvard Business Review Press published  The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge. That book specifically gave Customer Commons the job of doing for personal privacy terms what Creative Commons did for personal copyright.  And to do it by making privacy a contract between customers and businesses, rather than a “consent” to whatever the hell businesses wanted to shove down our gullets. (For example, with interruptive cookie “choices” that really aren’t and leave no audit trail.)

Work on that began in 2017, when the IEEE approached Customer Commons with an offer to host development of a standard for machine-readable personal privacy terms. That standard, officially called IEEE 7012-2025, and nicknamed MyTerms, was published this past January, concluding nine years of work.

Now what?

MyTerms is a great start toward completing Customer Commons’ audacious mission. Here are some goals we will achieve when that mission is accomplished:

1. VRM will be a business category, welcomed and engaged by CRM and CX functions on the sell sides of markets.
2. We will have proof that free customers are worth more than captive ones—to companies they engage, to whole markets, and to themselves. This was ProjectVRM’s original mission in 2006.
3. The intention economy will materialize when voluntary signaling from customers to companies outperforms and obsolesces surveillance as the primary means for companies to obtain data about customers.

MyTerms is required for all three, because a contract is the only way for companies to commit to respecting personal privacy, and MyTerms is the standard for doing that.

So the first challenge is to make Customer Commons viable as the first mover in establishing MyTerms in the world.

The second challenge is to make Customer Commons substantial enough to lead work toward all three of the challenges listed above. Customer Commons won’t be the only entity working on those. In the U.S., Consumer Reports has already stepped forward as a natural ally.  MyData Global is partnering with Customer Commons in standing up the MyTerms Alliance, which is HQ’d in Europe. There are many other potential partners, such as Mozilla and the EFF.

There is development work on MyTerms already. You can learn more about those at VRM Day, IIW, and AIW, which run M-F through the last week of this month (April 27 to May 1) at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.

Here are other ideas that have been floated in the past for Customer Commons:

1. Customers Union. Being for customers what the AARP is for retired people. Only bigger, because it would include everybody who is a customer of anything. This isn’t far from Consumers Union, which begat Consumer Reports, and is now its advocacy group.
2. CustomerCon. A trade show with company booths run by customers, to which companies are invited as guests. Key feature: no complaining. Guest companies are treated only to positive and constructive ideas. HT to Tim Hwang for helping come up with that one.
3. Omie. A tablet with apps free of Google and Apple. HT to Iain Henderson.
4. The ByWay, a new path for local e-commerce.
5. The Free Customer Award. This would be given to companies that value free customers and do nothing to entrap them. The canonical example described in The Intention Economy is Trader Joe’s. But there are others. In-N-Out Burger, for example.

I share those only to give you an idea of how big and influential Customer Commons might be, and how it’s possible to have fun making a new and better economy happen.

We’re not at Square One. Customer Commons is an extant nonprofit, has an energetic board, and a huge accomplishment by getting MyTerms finished. What it needs now is to build out a working organisation. How can we do that?

Let’s look at how Creative Commons got rolling in 2002 and kept moving after that. Here is what I’ve found in diggings so far—

• The History of Creative Commons in Wired (December 2011) says, “An hour after the court’s decision was announced, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation presented Creative Commons with $1,000,000 to launch the movement.” The case was Eldred v. Ashcroft.
• In 2008, there was a successful funding challenge from Hewlett: “The 5×5 challenge, issued in honor of Creative Commons’ fifth birthday, called for the organization to find five funders to each promise five years of support at $500,000 per year. In addition to the Hewlett Foundation, Creative Commons received pledges of $500,000 in yearly support for five years from Omidyar Network, as well as from an anonymous European trust. Google has pledged $300,000 in support renewable for five years, while Mozilla and Red Hat have each pledged to contribute $100,000 annually for five years. The final block of support comes from the board of Creative Commons, which has promised to personally raise or contribute $500,000 to the organization annually for five years.”(Source: Creative Commons Newsletter No.5, February 2008)
• A Creative Commons  announcement in April 2008 said, “We’re thrilled about a major new grant of $4 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, consisting of $2.5 million to provide general support to Creative Commons over five years, as well as $1.5 million to support ccLearn.”
• A MacArthur grant search reports a total of $3,225,000 provided between 2002 and 2022:
  • $750,000 in 2005 to support general operations for three years
  • $500,000 in 2007 to support Science Commons for two years
  • $700,000 in2008 to support general operations and an endowment campaign for three years
  • $25,000 in 2015 to provide travel and other support for attendees of the Creative Commons Global Summit in South Korea, for two months. The meeting was also funded in part by the Institute for Museu m and Library Services and th e Gates Foundation, and by the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism ($25,000), Mozilla ($10,000), and the Wikimedia Foundation ($10,000).
  • $50,000 in 2022 to support dedicated programming on open journalism issues at the 2023 Global Summit, “which is an annual event that brings together educators, artists, technologists, legal experts, and activists to promote the power of open licensing and global access.”

So, by inference, the phases were roughly this:

• Launch (2001–2002) $1M of initial funding
• Early build-out (2002–2004) +$1–3M with  additional foundation support
• Continuous operations (2005 onward) at ~$1–3M/year

That gives us an idea of what we need to raise. (Given inflation, multiply those numbers by 1.5x.)

I’ll tell you more when I find out more. Meanwhile, watch this space. Better yet, jump in and help out.

 

 

 

Nor can CRM. Not really. The middle name of both is Relationship, and those require respect for each other’s boundaries. We don’t have that yet online, and can’t without working standards (hello MyTerms), tech, and norms. In fact, the opposite prevails: extreme exploitation of absent personal privacy.

Helen Nissenbaum has been teaching us that for decades, and working on solutions. One is Adnauseum, which may be on your browser already.  It works (says that last link) “by automating ad clicks universally and blindly on behalf of its users. Built atop uBlock Origin, AdNauseam quietly clicks on every blocked ad, registering a visit on ad networks’ databases. As the collected data gathered shows an omnivorous click-stream, user tracking, targeting and surveillance become futile.” In another word, obfuscation.

And that’s what Helen will unpack when she speaks in our salon series here at Indiana University next Tuesday at 4 pm Eastern, and on Zoom. Her title is Why Obfuscation is (still) Needed (more than ever). Here’s the flyer, with the registration and Zoom links:

And in case you don’t click on that, here it is again.

See you there.

This post is for the benefit of anyone wondering about, researching, or going into business on the proposition that selling one’s own personal data is a good idea. Here are some of my learnings from having studied this proposition myself for the last twenty years or more.

1. The business does exist. See eleven companies in Markets for personal data listed among many other VRM-ish businesses on the ProjectVRM wiki.
2. The business category harvesting the most personal data is adtech (aka ad tech and “programmatic”) advertising, which is the surveillance-based side of the advertising business. It is at the heart of what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, and is now most of what advertising has become online. It’s roughly a trillion-dollar business. It is also nothing like advertising of the Mad Men kind. (Credit where due: old-fashioned advertising, aimed at whole populations, gave us nearly all the brand names known to the world). As I put it in Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff, Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself.
3. Adtech pays nothing to people for their data or data about them. Not personally. Google may pay carriers for traffic data harvested from phones, and corporate customers of auctioned personal data may pay publishers for moments in which ads can be placed in front of tracked individuals’ ears or eyeballs. Still, none of that money has ever gone to individuals for any reason, including compensation for the insults and inconveniences the system requires. So there is little if any existing infrastructure on which paying people for personal data can be scaffolded up. Nor are there any policy motivations. In fact,
4. Regulations have done nothing to slow down the juggernaut of growth in the adtech industry. For Google, Facebook, and other adtech giants, paying huge fines for violations (of the GDPR, the CCPA, the DMA, or whatever) is just the cost of doing business. The GDPR compliance services business is also in the multi-$billion range, and growing fast. In fact,
5. Regulations have made the experience of using the Web worse for everyone. Thank the GDPR for all the consent notices subtracting value from every website you visit while adding cognitive overhead and other costs to site visitors and operators. In nearly every case, these notices are ways for site operators to obey the letter of the GDPR while violating its spirit. And, although all these agreements are contracts, you have no record of what you’ve agreed to. So they are worse than worthless.
6. Tracking people without their clear and conscious invitation or a court order is wrong on its face. Period. Full stop. That tracking is The Way Things Are Done online does not make it right, any more than driving drunk or smoking in crowded elevators was just fine in the 1950s. When the Digital Age matures, decades from now, we will look back on our current time as one thick with extreme moral compromises that were finally corrected after the downsides became clear and more ethically sound technologies and economies came along. One of those corrections will be increasing personal agency rather than just corporate capacities. In fact,
7. Increasing personal independence and agency will be good for markets, because free customers are more valuable than captive ones. Having ways to gather, keep, and make use of personal data is an essential first step toward that goal. We have made very little progress in that direction so far. (Yes, there are lots of good projects listed here, but there we still a long way to go.)
8. Businesses being “user-centric” will do nothing to increase customers’ value to themselves and the marketplace. First, as long as we remain mere “users” of others’ systems, we will be in a subordinate and dependent role. While there are lots of things we can do in that role, we will be able to do far more if we are free and independent agents. Because of that,
9. We need technologies that create and increase personal independence and agency. Personal data stores (aka warehouses, vaults, clouds, life management platforms, lockers, and pods) are one step toward doing that. Many have been around for a long time: ProjectVRM currently lists thirty-three under the Personal Data Stores heading. Some have been there a long time. The problem with all of them is that they are still too focused on what people do as social beings in the Web 2.0 world, rather than on what they can do for themselves, both to become more well-adjusted human beings and more valuable customers in the marketplace. For that,
10. It will help to have independent personal AIs. These are AI systems that work for us, exclusively. None exist yet. When they do, they  will help us manage the personal data that fully matters:
    • Contacts—records and relationships
    • Calendars—where we’ve been, what we’ve done, with whom, where, and when
    • Health records and relationships with providers, going back all the way
    • Financial records and relationships, including past and present obligations
    • Property we have and where it is, including all the small stuff
    • Shopping—what we’ve bought, plan to buy, or might be thinking about,
    • Subscriptions—what we’re paying for, when they end or renew, what kind of deal we’re locked into, and what better ones might be out there.
    • Travel—Where we’ve been, what we’ve done, with whom, and when

Personal AIs are today where personal computers were fifty years ago. Nearly all the AI news today is about modern mainframe businesses: giants with massive data centers churning away on ingested data of all kinds. But some of these models are open sourced and can be made available to any of us for our own purposes, such as dealing with the abundance of data in our own lives that is mostly out of control. Some of it has never been digitized. With AI help it could be.

I’m in a time crunch right now. So, if you’re with me this far, read We can do better than selling our data, which I wrote in 2018 and remains as valid as ever. Or dig The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), which Tim Berners Lee says inspired Solid. I’m thinking about following it up. If you’re interested in seeing that happen, let me know.

In her latest Ars Technica story, Ashley Belanger reports that Patreon, the widely used and much-trusted monetization platform for creative folk, opposes the minimal personal privacy protections provided by a law you probably haven’t heard of until now: the Video Privacy Protection Act, or VPPA. Patreon, she writes, wants a judge to declare that law (which dates from the videotape rental age) unconstitutional because it inconveniences Patreon’s ability to share the personal data of its users with other parties.† Naturally, the EFF, the Center for Democracy & Technology, the ACLU of Northern California, and the ACLU itself all stand opposed to Patreon on this and have filed an amicus brief explaining why.

But I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to bring up the inconvenient fact that Ars Technica is also in the surveillance business. A PageXray of Ashley’s story finds this—

• 360 adserver requests
• 259 tracking requests
• 131 other requests

—which it visualizes with this:

And that’s just one small part of it.

But will Ashley, or any reporter, grab the third rail of their employer’s participation in the tracking-based advertising business? Or visit that business’s responsibility for what was already the biggest boycott in human history way back in 2015? The odds are against it. I’ve challenged many reporters to grab that third rail, just like I’m challenging Ashley here. In every case, nothing happened.

I never challenged Farhad Manjoo, but he did come through exposing The New York Times (his employer’s) own participation in the privacy-opposed tracking-based adtech business, back in 2019. Here’s a PageXray of tracking via that piece today:

Better, but not ideal.

Five years ago this month, I wrote a column about privacy in Linux Journal with the same title as this post. Here it is again, with just a few tiny edits. Amazing how little things have changed since then—and how much worse they have become. But I do see hope. Read on.

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If you think regulations are going to protect your privacy, you’re wrong. In fact, they can make things worse, especially if they start with the assumption that your privacy is provided only by other parties, most of whom are incentivized to violate it.

Exhibit A for how much worse things can get is the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). As soon as the GDPR went into full effect in May 2018, damn near every corporate entity on the Web put up a “cookie notice” requiring acceptance of terms and privacy policies that allow them to continue violating your privacy by harvesting, sharing, auctioning off and otherwise using your data, and data about you.

For websites and services in that harvesting business (a population that rounds to the whole commercial web), these notices provide a one-click way to adhere to the letter of the GDPR while violating its spirit.

There’s also big business in the friction that it produces. To see how big, look up GDPR+compliance on Google. You’ll get 232 million results (give or take a few dozen million).

None of those results are for you, even though you are who the GDPR is supposed to protect. See, to the GDPR, you are a mere “data subject” and not an independent and fully functional participant in the technical, social, and economic ecosystem the Internet supports by design. All privacy protections around your data are the burden of other parties.

Or at least that’s the interpretation that nearly every lawmaker, regulatory bureaucrat, lawyer, and service provider goes by. (One exception is Elizabeth Renieris @hackylawyer. Her collection of postings is required reading on the GDPR and much else.) The same goes for those selling GDPR compliance services, comprising most of those 190 million GDPR+compliance search results.

The clients of those services include nearly every website and service on Earth that harvests personal data. These entities have no economic incentive to stop harvesting, sharing, and selling personal data the usual ways, beyond fear that the GDPR might actually be enforced, which so far (with few exceptions), it hasn’t been. (See Without enforcement, the GDPR is a fail.)

Worse, the tools for “managing” your exposure to data harvesters are provided entirely by the websites you visit and the services you engage. The “choices” they provide (if they provide any at all) are between 1) acquiescence to them doing what they please and 2) a maze of menus full of checkboxes and toggle switches “controlling” your exposure to unknown threats from parties you’ve never heard of, with no way to record your choices or monitor effects.

So let’s explore just one site’s presentation, and then get down to what it means and why it matters.

Our example is https://www.mirror.co.uk. If you haven’t clicked on that site already, you’ll see a cookie notice that says,

We use cookies to help our site work, to understand how it is used, and to tailor the adverts presented on our site. By clicking “Accept” below, you agree to us doing so. You can read more in our cookie notice. Or, if you do not agree, you can click Manage below to access other choices.

They don’t mention that “tailor the adverts” really means something like this:

We open your browser to infestation by tracking beacons from countless parties in the online advertising business, plus who-knows-what-else that might be working with those parties (there is no way to tell, and if there was we wouldn’t provide it), so those parties and their “partners” can use those beacons to follow you like a marked animal everywhere you go and report your activities back to a vast marketplace where personal data about you is shared, bought and sold, much of it in real time, supposedly so your eyeballs can be hit with “relevant” or “interest-based” advertising as you travel from site to site and service to service. While we are sure there are bad collateral effects (fraud and malware, for example), we don’t care about those because it’s our business to get paid just for clicks or “impressions,” whether you’re impressed or not—and the odds that you won’t be impressed average to certain.

Okay, so now click on the “Manage” button.

Up will pop a rectangle where it says “Here you can control cookies, including those for advertising, using the buttons below. Even if you turn off the advertising-related cookies, you will still see adverts on our site, because they help us to fund it. However, those adverts will simply be less relevant to you. You can learn more about cookies in our Cookie Notice on the site.”

Under that text, in the left column, are six “Purposes of data collection”, all defaulted with little check marks to ON (though only five of them show, giving the impression that there are only those five). The right column is called “Our partners”, and it shows the first five of what turn out to be 259 companies, nearly all of which are not brands known to the world or to anybody outside the business (and probably not known widely within the business as well). All are marked ON by that little check mark. Here’s that list, just through the letter A:

• 1020, Inc. dba Placecast and Ericsson Emodo
• 1plusX AG
• 2KDirect, Inc. (dba iPromote)
• 33Across
• 7Hops.com Inc. (ZergNet)
• A Million Ads Limited
• A.Mob
• Accorp Sp. z o.o.
• Active Agent AG
• ad6media
• ADARA MEDIA UNLIMITED
• AdClear GmbH
• Adello Group AG
• Adelphic LLC
• Adform A/S
• Adikteev
• ADITION technologies AG
• Adkernel LLC
• Adloox SA
• ADMAN – Phaistos Networks, S.A.
• ADman Interactive SL
• AdMaxim Inc.
• Admedo Ltd
• admetrics GmbH
• Admotion SRL
• Adobe Advertising Cloud
• AdRoll Inc
• adrule mobile GmbH
• AdSpirit GmbH
• adsquare GmbH
• Adssets AB
• AdTheorent, Inc
• AdTiming Technology Company Limited
• ADUX
• advanced store GmbH
• ADventori SAS
• Adverline
• ADYOULIKE SA
• Aerserv LLC
• affilinet
• Amobee, Inc.
• AntVoice
• Apester Ltd
• AppNexus Inc.
• ARMIS SAS
• Audiens S.r.l.
• Avid Media Ltd
• Avocet Systems Limited

If you bother to “manage” any of this, what record do you have of it—or of all the other collections of third parties who you’ve agreed to follow you around? Remember, there are a different collection of these at every website with third parties that track you, and different UIs, each provided by other third parties.

It might be easier to discover and manage parasites in your belly than cookies in your browser.

Think I exaggerate? The long list of cookies in just one of my browsers (which I had to dig deep to find) starts with this list:

• 1rx.io
• 247-inc.net
• 2mdn.net
• 33across.com
• 360yield.com
• 3lift.com
• 4finance.com

After several hundred others, my cookie  list ends with:

• zencdn.net
• zoom.us
• zopim.com

I know what zoom.us is. The rest are a mystery to me.

To look at just that first one, 1rx.io, I have to dig way down in the basement of the preferences directory (in Chrome it’s chrome://settings/cookies/detail?site=1rx.io), where I find that its locally stored data is this:

_rxuuid

Name
_rxuuid
Content
%7B%22rx_uuid%22%3A%22RX-2b58f1b1-96a4-4e1d-9de8-3cb1ca4175b0%22%2C%22nxtrdr%22%3Afalse%7D
Domain
.1rx.io
Path
/
Send for
Any kind of connection
Accessible to script
No (HttpOnly)
Created
Wednesday, December 12, 2018 at 4:48:53 AM
Expires
Thursday, December 12, 2019 at 4:48:53 AM

I’m a somewhat technical guy, and at least half of that stuff means nothing to me.

As for “managing” those,  my only choice on that page is to “Remove All”. Does that mean Remove everything on that page alone or Remove all cookies everywhere? And how can I remember what I’ve had removed?

Obviously, there is no way for anybody to “manage” this, in any meaningful sense of the word.

We also can’t fix it on the sites and services side, no matter how much those sites and services care (which most don’t) about the “customer journey”, the “customer experience” or any of the other bullshit they’re buying from marketers this week.

Even within the CRM (customer relationship management) world, the B2B customers of CRM companies use one cloud and one set of tools to create as many different “experiences” for users and customers as there are companies deploying those tools to manage customer relationships from their side.  There are no corresponding tools on our side. (Though there is work going on. See here.)

So the digital world remains one where we have no common or standard way to scale our privacy and data usage tools, choices, or experiences across all sites and services. And that’s what we’ll need if we want real privacy online.

The simple place where we need to start is this: privacy is personal, meaning something we create for ourselves (which in the natural world we do with clothing and shelter, both of which lack equivalents in the digital world).

And we need to be clear that privacy is not a grace of privacy policies and terms of service that differ with every company and over which none of us have true control—especially when there is an entire industry devoted to making those companies untrustworthy, even if they are in full compliance with privacy laws.

Devon Loffreto (who coined the term self-sovereign identity and whose good work we’ll be visiting in an upcoming issue of Linux Journal) puts the issue in simple geek terms: we need root authority over our lives. Hashtag: #OwnRoot.

It is only by owning root that we can crank up agency on the individual’s side. We have a perfect base for that in the standards and protocols that gave us the Internet, the Web, email, and too little else. And we need it here too. Soon.

We (a few colleagues and I) created Customer Commons as a place for terms that individuals can proffer as first parties, just by pointing at them, much as licenses at Creative Commons can be pointed at. Sites and services can agree to those terms, and both can keep records and follow audit trails.

And there are some good signs that this will happen. For example, the IEEE approached Customer Commons last year with the suggestion that we stand up a working group for machine-readable personal privacy terms. It’s called P7012. If you’d like to join, please do.

Unless we #OwnRoot for our own lives online, privacy will remain an empty promise by a legion of violators.

One more thing. We can put the GDPR to our use if we like. That’s because Article 4 of the GDPR defines a data controller as “the natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body which, alone or jointly with others, determines the purposes and means of the processing of personal data…” This means each of us can be our own data controller. Most lawyers dealing with the GDPR don’t agree with that. They think the individual data subject will always need a fiduciary or an intermediary of some kind: an agent of the individual, but not an individual with agency. Yet the simple fact is that we should have root authority over our lives online, and that means we should have some degree of control over our data exposures, and how our data, and data about us, is used—much as we do over how we control or moderate our privacy in the physical world. More about all that in upcoming posts.

The original version of this post was published on the Private Internet Access blog. Private Internet Access and Linux Journal at the time were both holdings of London Trust Media.

Also, check out the Privacy Manifesto at the ProjectVRM wiki. I maintain it and welcome bug fixes.

† This is an example of what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification” and Wikipedia (at that link) more politely calls “platform decay.” It’s a big trade-away of goodwill by Patreon. Says to me they must be making an enshitload of money in the adtech fecosystem.