Chooseday

Working to kill off cookie notices

The IEEE’s cookie notice says, “This website utilizes technologies such as cookies to enable essential site functionality, as well as for analytics, personalization, and targeted advertising. Privacy Policy.”

Its privacy policy, at that last link, says it collects eighteen kinds of personal information, and says one of the purposes for collecting it is—

To serve personalized advertising to you. We don’t share your information with advertisers without your consent. We allow advertisers to choose the characteristics of users who will see their advertisements, and we may use any of the non-personally-identifiable attributes we have collected to select the appropriate audience for those advertisements. When you click on or otherwise interact with an advertisement, there is a possibility that the advertiser may place a cookie in your browser and that your attributes meet the criteria the advertiser selected.

Yet a PageXray of IEEE.org shows no adtech tracking, and hardly any tracking at all.

I bring this up because I led work on MyTerms (IEEE 7012-2025 – IEEE Standard for Machine-Readable Personal Privacy Terms 7012), and we now have a new group in IEEE’s Industry Connections program working to deploy and establish MyTerms worldwide. The group title is Individual Defined Privacy Terms Roadmap.

If you want to make cookie notices go away, start or support work toward making MyTerms happen, and help us make that work cooperative by joining that group.

Sign up here.

And what do you think?

Andy Kessler of The Wall Street Journal asks: Does AI Have a Fiduciary Duty? and suggests “The answer may lie in the common law.” His concluding paragraph:

I’m no fan of trial lawyers but, like it or not, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Meta and perhaps every Chinese open-weight AI model may already be covered by common-law fiduciary responsibility. We’re a few court cases away from finding out. They need to start acting that way or their trillion-dollar valuations may become a target much larger than the tobacco companies in the 1990s.