Your terms, on the record

Every site writes its own terms of service, and you get one button: “I agree.” Tools that summarize the fine print already exist, but they all stop at telling you what’s wrong.

While researching the problem, I found an opening. Twelve US states now require sites to honor a privacy signal your browser can send, and a new standard, IEEE 7012, lets people propose their own terms. Nobody has built a consumer product on it yet.

Countersign is my take on what that could look like: a browser extension where you write your terms once, and every site you sign up for gets checked against them.