next steps on tinyMyTerms

This is a follow-up post from VRM Day 2026.

One of the areas we worked on was tinyMyTerms: Simple no-code implementation of MyTerms.

Basically the way it works is:

• A site can post a link to terms of service (ToS), in JSON format. (See the link tag in the HTML head on this page.)

• The site adds an annoying consent dialog—tagged with a unique identifer for the ToS used.

• A user can indicate acceptance of a particular ToS by adding that identifier to their ad blocker’s blocklist.

The advantage of doing it this way is that no new code is required, and it works on static sites. (The people who would be doing it are the kind of early adopters whohave a good ad blocker already.)

The disadvantage is that there’s no record on file that a specific contract was accepted by a specific user, so this only works for one possible ToS per site.

But if a site does just have one ToS, the level of record-keeping that’s required (in US courts anyway) can be met by a static site. SeeIf You Don’t Keep Good Records, Don’t Be Surprised if Your TOS Formation Fails in Court-White v. PayPal by Prof. Eric Goldman. Basically you need to have an archive of the ToS content and required flow that was in place on a site as of a certain date—then you can show that a visitor to the site must have entered into a contract. (IANAL, ask your lawyer about “ToS formation” for more info.)

Also, this way requires users to have an ad blocker with element hiding functionality. But just like email spammers made it safe to assume that any serious email user is going to have some kind of a spam filter, today’s search engines have made it safe to assume that any serious web user is going to have an ad blocker, or will be getting one any day now after their IT department figures out the security issues. (More:Winners don’t click search ads)

So requiring an ad blocker is a lot easier than many other approaches, such as requiring a dedicated MyTerms extension.

tinyMyTerms, or the whole enchilada?

If you want your site to have a deluxe MyTerms implementation, where some users could accept extra cross-context data sharing features while other users stick to the baseline, you would still need to add some new code on the server side. Also this does not work if you want people to turn off their ad blocker on your site. Other projects are working on this and you can keep up atMyTerms – A New Global Privacy Standard for Fair Data Exchange.

For JS abstainers

(updated 11 May 2026)

For what it’s worth, this could technically run without JavaScript.

The trick is that the consent dialog is not a div but anHTML dialog element. So you can do something like this:

The open attribute sets the dialog to be open on page load, so it doesn’t need to be opened from JavaScript.

Then inside the dialog, the accept button is an HTML button, with command="close" to make it close the dialog, also without running JavaScript.

So tinyMyTerms may have overachieved—at VRM Day we didn’t have the goal of making it work without even JS, but this seems to work. Maybe think of tinyMyTerms as improvements to adesire path—not a physical desire path, but starting from a folk practice of “let’s just hide the annoying consent dialogs” and making it standardized and legal. There is still a role for a more complex system that gets you more of the possible features ofIEEE 7012-2025, but sometimes you need the version that’s simpler to get going.

Missing pieces

I am getting this site a little closer to complying. What I am going to do is, until the MyTerms filter lists get out there and more readers get them installed, is tag my annoying dialog in such a way that a normal EasyList ad blocker will take care of it.

For now, if you want to see the dialog, just turn off your ad blocker temporarily. That will simulate what a person without tinyMyTerms set up would see.

When there are ad blocker filter lists with the MyTerms entries I will be able to update.

Another missing piece: a normal web site ToS needs more than just privacy language. More on that:notes on Humans Commons.