User-set machine-readable terms
Letting a person state their own terms for how their data and interactions are handled, in a machine-readable form chosen from a neutral roster, so that a service (and the agents on both sides) can read the terms, agree to them, and keep a shared record of the agreement.
The impact of agents
As agent use grows, one-way consent stops being stable in either direction. Today the service proffers a standard-form contract and the person clicks accept, because there is nothing else to do. An agent that mechanically accepts whatever a service proffers turns that click-through into acceptance no one read, executed at machine speed. And an agent that presents its principal's own terms makes individual-side terms feasible for the first time, because a machine can proffer, read, and record them at no marginal cost. Government services will therefore start receiving interactions that arrive with a user's proffered terms. An agency with no way to read them will re-impose its own defaults, leaving no record that terms were ever proffered. The record of what was agreed then stays one-sided at exactly the moment agreement records start to matter for accountability.
What must be verified
When an interaction proceeds under user-proffered terms, both parties need confidence about the same three things: which standard-form term the person proffered, that the service agreed to it, and that each side holds a durable record of that agreement that matches the other's. The agency operating the service owes the obligation to hold its half of the record and to honor the agreed term in its downstream handling; the roster keeper (the neutral, non-business entity the standard requires) owes the obligation to keep the standard-form texts stable, so a term reference resolves to settled wording rather than to whatever either side later claims it said. The bar is proportionate: a recorded pointer to a roster term, not bespoke contract negotiation, and not a cryptographic proof where a dual-held receipt is enough.
Protecting access
The risk is that setting terms becomes a second gate. A person without an agent, without the reading level or vocabulary to weigh standard-form terms, or acting through an assisted or non-digital channel will not proffer anything, and is handled on whatever the service imposes. A person with low trust in the system is a particular concern, since they are the most likely to want their own terms and the least likely to have the tooling to express them.
Keeping the path open
- Hold the no-terms default to the same outcome, on terms no worse than today's baseline.
- Let an assisted channel record a proffered term on a person's behalf.
- Give each roster term a plain-language rendering a person can read before choosing it.
- Treat any terms-choosing control as a novel agent surface: operable by keyboard and assistive technology, its state and consequence conveyed in plain language.
Response surface
A person chooses their own standard-form term before the interaction proceeds, and both sides keep a matching record of what was agreed.
Your terms for this service
Choose a standard term from the public roster. The service reads it and records the agreement. You can also proceed without one.
Proceeding with no term reaches the same outcome, on terms no worse than today’s baseline: declining a term is recorded, never penalized. The roster of standard-form terms is kept by a neutral body, not by the service agreeing to them.
Maturity
- Emerging
For the instrument itself, where IEEE 7012-2025 is a published international standard, free to read, with a named lineage and a candidate roster keeper.
- Frontier Headline
As a government-service practice: no deployment reads, evaluates, or agrees to a user's proffered terms, and what happens when a service declines a term is undesigned.
Precedents
IEEE 7012-2025, machine-readable personal privacy terms. The standard makes the individual the first party: terms are chosen from a roster of standard-form agreements kept by an independent, neutral non-business entity on the Creative Commons model, machines on both sides read and agree, and the agreement is recorded and kept by both. It inverts the click-through, and it is published rather than proposed.
Customer Commons as roster keeper. The standard names no keeper of the roster, and Customer Commons, whose lineage chaired the working group, positions itself as one under the MyTerms banner. The candidacy rests on Customer Commons' own publications, which makes it real as a claim and ungoverned as an institution. Which roster a government service recognizes is a policy decision the standard leaves open.
The Kantara consent receipt, with the direction reversed. A dual-held agreement record reverses the direction of a consent receipt, and the receipt structure is settled practice. The record half of user-set terms has infrastructure already, extended from recording the service's terms to recording the person's.
What carries over to agent use
The standard is published and the record-keeping half rides on settled consent-receipt practice, so the mechanics travel. What has not traveled anywhere yet is the service side, and that is most of the pattern: no government deployment reads or agrees to proffered terms, no policy names which roster a service recognizes, and nothing settles what a service does when it declines a term: refuse the interaction, negotiate, or fall back to its own defaults with the refusal recorded. The roster keeper's neutrality is asserted, not governed. Adoption is months old, so the honest posture is that this pattern names a direction the instrument now makes possible; no agency yet operates it.
Where things go wrong
Without the pattern, the failure is symmetrical and leaves no trace: users' agents click-accept the service's terms at machine speed, the service ignores anything the user's side proffers, and both sides hold records of an agreement that never meaningfully happened: acceptance no one read, with better logging. The adversarial readings run through each party. A service can perform agreement while mapping every proffered term onto its existing policy, so the terms change nothing (the institution gaming its own commitment); a captured or partial roster keeper can tilt the standard forms toward one side while wearing neutrality; and a person's own agent can proffer terms the person never chose, which is why the record both sides keep has to show the term as the person selected it, not as the agent negotiated it. Mis-implemented, the pattern becomes a new gate: a service that refuses interactions on any terms mismatch has turned an optional instrument of user power into a reason to turn people away.
Sources
3 references
The instrument, the operating deployment, or the official record itself.
Writing about the subject rather than the framework itself, including vendor commentary.