IEEE 7012-2025

New IEEE Standard - Active.

Contractual interactions and agreements between individuals and the service providers they engage on a network, including websites, applications and AI agents, are covered in this standard.

It describes how individuals, acting as first parties, can proffer their privacy requirements as contractual terms and arrive at agreements recorded and kept by both sides. These terms shall be chosen from a collection of standard-form agreements in a roster kept by an independent and neutral non-business entity. (This is similar to how artists might choose Creative Commons licenses allowing or restricting certain kinds of uses for artists’ creative work.)

Computing devices and software performing as agents for both first and second parties shall engage using any protocol that serves the purpose. The first party shall point to a preferred agreement, or a set of agreements, from which the second party shall accept one.

Party-to-party negotiations over terms in any of these contracts or other agreements are outside the scope of this standard.

If both parties agree, the chosen contract or agreement shall be signed electronically by both parties or their agents, and a matching record shall be kept by both sides in a form that can be retrieved, audited, or disputed, if necessary, at some later time—and which is available to do so easily.

Note: The PDF of this standard is available at no charge complements of the IEEE GET program https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/browse/standards/get-program/page/series?id=93.

The standard identifies/addresses the manner in which personal privacy terms are proffered and how they can be read and agreed to by machines.

The scope of this draft standard is confined to routines in which persons acting as first parties arrive at contractual agreements with organizational entities acting as second-party service providers.

It is limited to the selection and signing of a contract kept in a public roster by a neutral noncommercial entity, with identical copies of that contract kept by both parties.

The purpose of the standard is to provide individuals with means to proffer their own terms respecting personal privacy, in ways that can be read, acknowledged and agreed to by machines operated by others in the networked world.

In a more formal sense, the purpose of the standard is to enable individuals to operate as first parties in agreements with others--mostly companies--operating as second parties.