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

Digital generated image of people surrounded by interactive transparent and glowing panels with data. Visualising smart technology, blockchain and artificial intelligence

(Image credit: Getty Images | Andriy Onufriyenko)

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.

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.

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.

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Hope’s been writing about games for about a decade, starting out way back when on the Australian Nintendo fan site Vooks.net. Since then, she’s talked far too much about games and tech for publications such as Techlife, Byteside, IGN, and GameSpot. Of course there’s also here at PC Gamer, where she gets to indulge her inner hardware nerd with news and reviews. You can usually find Hope fawning over some art, tech, or likely a wonderful combination of them both and where relevant she’ll share them with you here. When she’s not writing about the amazing creations of others, she’s working on what she hopes will one day be her own. You can find her fictional chill out ambient far future sci-fi radio show/album/listening experience podcast right here.

No, she’s not kidding.

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