Data Labels

Category Masterclass

Recorded March 04, 2026

Published March 11, 2026

Transcript

The digital ecosystem has a real problem - the absence of terms and conditions. Since the dot com boom, publishers, content providers have made their information available - their intellectual property available - for free. And what's happened is companies like Google have come along and taken that content. And in return, they've directed traffic and people back to that original content provider. So this uneasy status quo developed between content producers, content owners, and the big tech companies. Unfortunately with the advent of AI, that's changing. What we need is a way of expressing terms and conditions in a machine readable form that can be used by both publishers and AI companies and any other party to make it clear what rights are being granted by the content owner to the receiving party. This is also true in other aspects of the digital ecosystem, particularly people's personal data. There's a privacy policy on the website, but once the data's been captured and the data's left the website, there's no reference back to those original terms and conditions that form the privacy policy. So data labels is a proposal that addresses both of these problems. It's a universal and very simple way of attaching a terms document to any type of data. It initially focusses on advertising an OpenRTB, cookies within the web browser environment, and also AIs with robots.txt. When enabled fully, it would ensure that data interoperability can be implemented within web browsers and other interoperability providers, and ensure that it respects people's privacy rights, because they would both agree on the terms and conditions, and not just treat the main names as an arbitrary way of restricting interoperability. This would then enable competition in the digital market, which we believe would be very welcome. So check out the proposal today at the URL at the end of this video, and then engage. It's open to everyone.

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