notconsent

You click “I Agree.”
You don’t consent.

Every year, you accept terms nobody could read. The Declaration of Qualified Assent and Standing Objection is a formal, signed, public statement: I click because I have no choice. I agree only to what the service needs to work. Here is my list of objections to everything else.

Read the Declaration Just give me the plain-language version

Honesty first: it will not magically void the agreement you clicked — courts enforce click-through agreements whether you read them or not. It creates a dated record that you objected, invokes statutory rights you already have, and counts you. That’s the whole pitch. We promise not to oversell it.

Recitals

The terms are the trap

The law treats your click as informed, freely given consent. That rests on a factual premise — that a person who clicked read, understood, and agreed. The Declaration repudiates that premise, on the record.

Unreadable by design

Agreements “routinely exceed any duration susceptible of contemporaneous review.” One game’s terms run 42,000 words. Nobody reads them. Nobody could.

At the worst possible moment

They appear at the exact moment you’re least able to review them — you just want to send the message, watch the show, buy the toaster.

Refusal means exile

Saying no locks you out of the service — and frequently out of labor, commerce, communication, and civic participation. That is not a real choice.

“It’s like a restaurant that seats you, then slides over a 40-page contract saying that by eating the bread, you agree the chef can’t be blamed for anything, that you can never complain publicly, and that your table conversation may be recorded and sold. You’re hungry. Everyone else has already eaten. You sign.” — The Consent Manifesto, plain-language guide, on the Recitals

Article II, in two words

The core idea

Two definitions do all the work. Everything you click counts only for what the service genuinely needs to function. The rest, you object to.

Qualified Assent

Plain words “Yes, I clicked agree — but only in the sense that I pressed the button, not in the sense that I truly accepted everything in it.”

When you swipe your transit card, you’re not endorsing the transit authority’s management philosophy. You’re paying to get to work. Your tap means “I need this service,” nothing more.

Operational Necessity

Plain words The magic measuring stick. A term is okay if the service literally cannot work without it. Everything else is on the objections list.

A photo app needs permission to store your photos. It does not need the right to sell your face prints to advertisers — that’s just greed wearing a lanyard.

You buy a toaster. The receipt includes a form: “By accepting this toaster you agree that ToastCorp may enter your home annually to photograph your kitchen, that you waive your right to sue if it burns down the house, and that you’ll arbitrate all disputes in Delaware.” You take the toaster because you need toast. You accepted toast. The kitchen photos, the lawsuit waiver, the Delaware trips? Never agreed to. They came in the same box; you didn’t order them. — Article II, the core move

The instrument · §8.4 canonical publication: this page

The Declaration

The full text of the Declaration of Qualified Assent and Standing Objection, reproduced verbatim. Version 1.0, released into the public domain. To sign it: copy the signature block, or see the instructions below.

DECLARATION OF QUALIFIED ASSENT
AND STANDING OBJECTION

A Public Instrument of Conditional Consent

Version 1.0 — CC0 1.0 (Public Domain)

Version 1.0CC0 1.0 · Public DomainCanonical publication: https://notconsent.com/

Preamble

THIS DECLARATION (the “Instrument”) is made and published by the undersigned natural person (the “Declarant”), and is addressed to any natural or juridical person, or any successor, assign, affiliate, agent, or contractor thereof (each, a “Counterparty”), that offers or provides any product, service, platform, device, software, or content (collectively, the “Service”) to the Declarant under terms presented for acceptance at the time of, or in the course of, such use.

Recitals

WHEREAS, the Declarant is from time to time required, as a condition precedent to access or continued use of a Service, to indicate assent to instruments styled as terms of service, terms of use, end-user license agreements, privacy policies, or the like (each, an “Agreement”);

WHEREAS, such Agreements routinely exceed any duration susceptible of contemporaneous review, and are presented under conditions in which refusal entails exclusion from the Service, and frequently from labor, commerce, communication, or civic participation;

WHEREAS, assent so obtained is assent in form but not in substance, and a body of law that treats such assent as meaningful consent rests upon a factual premise that the Declarant expressly repudiates;

WHEREAS, the Declarant does not assert the nullity of instruments to which mechanical assent has been given, but does assert that consent so obtained is defective, partial, and subject to the qualifications and objections herein declared;

NOW, THEREFORE, the Declarant declares as follows:

Article I — Definitions

1.1 “Qualified Assent” means assent to an Agreement given solely as a mechanical precondition to use of a Service, qualified in its entirety by the declarations, limitations, and objections set forth in this Instrument.

1.2 “Operational Necessity” means a term, right, license, or data processing activity strictly and demonstrably required for the provision, in accordance with reasonable consumer expectation, of the specific function of the Service that the Declarant has requested.

1.3 “Anti-Consumer Functionality” means any term, feature, or practice that operates to the detriment of the user beyond Operational Necessity, including without limitation those enumerated in Article IV.

1.4 “Material Change” means any amendment, restatement, supplement, or modification of an Agreement that alters, expands, or diminishes the rights, obligations, licenses, waivers, or remedies of either party, or that alters the scope, duration, or purpose of any data processing activity.

1.5 “Notice” means communication of the substance of a matter to the Declarant, in plain language, by a channel reasonably calculated to reach the Declarant before the matter takes effect, in a form permitting contemporaneous comprehension. Posting to a webpage, footnote, billing insert, or general announcement does not constitute Notice.

Article II — Declaration of Qualified Assent

2.1 The Declarant’s assent to any Agreement is a Qualified Assent. It is given without reading capacity commensurate with the length of the Agreement, and without any realistic power of negotiation, and shall not be construed as informed, freely given, or specific consent to any provision except to the extent of Operational Necessity.

2.2 Where an Agreement bundles provisions into a single act of acceptance, the Declarant’s acceptance extends only to such provisions as constitute Operational Necessity. As to all other provisions, the Declarant objects as set forth in Article IV.

2.3 No provision of any Agreement shall be construed as consent, authorization, or waiver beyond the limitations of this Article II.

Article III — Limitations on Licenses and Data Rights

3.1 Any license granted by the Declarant to content, data, communications, or other materials of the Declarant is limited to what constitutes Operational Necessity, is non-exclusive, is revocable upon termination of the Service, and does not extend to sublicensing, commercial exploitation, or uses unrelated to the requested function.

3.2 The Declarant does not consent to the use of the Declarant’s content, communications, behavioral data, or likeness for the training, fine-tuning, evaluation, or improvement of machine learning or artificial intelligence systems.

3.3 The Declarant does not consent to the sale, sharing, rental, brokerage, or disclosure of the Declarant’s personal data to any third party, except where such transfer constitutes Operational Necessity and is disclosed with the identity and purpose of the recipient.

3.4 The Declarant does not consent to the processing of biometric identifiers, precise geolocation, or behavioral profiles beyond Operational Necessity.

3.5 Nothing in this Article shall be construed to limit any statutory right of the Declarant, including rights of access, deletion, portability, correction, and objection, which rights are hereby invoked in full.

Article IV — Schedule of Objections

The Declarant objects to, and withholds Qualified Assent from, each of the following categories of provision or practice:

4.1 — Forced Arbitration and Waiver of Collective Redress.

Any provision requiring arbitration of disputes, waiving participation in class, collective, or representative proceedings, or restricting the Declarant’s access to any court of competent jurisdiction, including any provision imposing individualized-proceedings requirements.

4.2 — Opt-Out Architecture.

Any scheme by which an Anti-Consumer Functionality is enabled by default and may be avoided only through affirmative action by the Declarant. Any functionality operating to the Declarant’s detriment beyond Operational Necessity shall be disabled unless the Declarant has opted in by separate, specific, unbundled act.

4.3 — Forced Updates.

Any provision permitting the mandatory installation of firmware, software, or configuration updates to hardware or software owned or lawfully possessed by the Declarant, including updates that remove functionality, degrade performance, alter interoperability, or disable features present at the time of purchase, without the Declarant’s prior consent to each such update.

4.4 — Denial of Ownership.

Any provision characterizing the acquisition of a good, device, digital content, or software as a license, revocable privilege, or conditional access arrangement where the form of the transaction and reasonable consumer expectation indicate a sale; any provision permitting the revocation, deletion, impairment, or delisting of purchased content or functionality; and any provision obstructing repair, modification, resale, or interoperability of goods owned by the Declarant.

4.5 — Unilateral Modification.

Any provision permitting amendment of an Agreement without prior Notice of each Material Change, its purpose, and its full extent, and without affording the Declarant a genuine opportunity to decline the change and terminate with data portability and proportionate refund of prepaid consideration.

4.6 — Blanket Assent and Unbundled Refusal.

Any structure under which access to a Service is conditioned on acceptance of provisions unrelated to Operational Necessity.

4.7 — Excessive Length and Obscurity.

Any Agreement whose length, structure, or language exceeds what is susceptible of review by a reasonably diligent person at the time and place of assent, or which buries material terms below the threshold of reasonably conspicuous notice.

4.8 — Liability Limitations and Indemnity.

Any provision disclaiming liability for the Counterparty’s own negligence, willful misconduct, or violations of law; any provision capping liability below the foreseeable loss of a reasonable user; and any provision requiring the Declarant to indemnify the Counterparty except for claims arising from the Declarant’s own willful misconduct.

4.9 — Unilateral Termination.

Any provision permitting termination or suspension of the Declarant’s account or access without cause, without prior Notice, or without a process of cure, appeal, or data export.

4.10 — Retention Without Service.

Any provision permitting discontinuation of a Service, feature, or purchased content without refund of unamortized prepaid consideration and without a reasonable period of export opportunity.

4.11 — Subscriptions and Cancellation Friction.

Any provision imposing automatic renewal without prior Notice of each renewal, or imposing cancellation procedures materially more burdensome than the enrollment procedures.

4.12 — Restriction on Remedy.

Any provision shortening the period within which a claim may be brought below the applicable statutory limitation period, imposing an inconvenient exclusive forum or governing law with no reasonable relation to the Declarant, or waiving the Declarant’s moral rights or statutory consumer protections.

4.13 — Non-Disparagement and Gag Provisions.

Any provision restricting the Declarant’s communication of factual reviews, criticism, or complaints regarding the Counterparty or the Service.

4.14 — Catch-All.

Any other provision constituting Anti-Consumer Functionality, whether or not enumerated herein.

Article V — Conditions of Effect

5.1 This Instrument applies to each Agreement accepted after its publication and to each renewal, extension, or Material Change of any pre-existing relationship.

5.2 Counterparties are hereby given Notice of this Instrument by its publication at the uniform resource locator recorded in Section 8.4. Each Counterparty is charged with knowledge of its contents upon the publication date.

5.3 In any conflict between this Instrument and an Agreement, this Instrument prevails as to the Declarant to the maximum extent permitted by law; in any conflict between an Agreement and applicable law, the law prevails.

Article VI — Reservation of Rights

6.1 The Declarant reserves all rights, remedies, claims, and defenses not expressly waived herein, at law and in equity, including all rights arising under consumer protection, privacy, unfair competition, and contract law of every competent jurisdiction.

6.2 Nothing herein, and no conduct of the Declarant in use of a Service, shall be construed as a waiver of any statutory right, as acceptance of any provision objected to under Article IV, or as assent to any Material Change noticed after the date hereof.

6.3 The Declarant’s payment of consideration, continued use of a Service, or other performance under protest shall not be construed as affirmation of any provision objected to herein.

Article VII — Interpretation

7.1 This Instrument shall be construed in accordance with its purpose: to render visible, recordable, and actionable the defect of consent inherent in standard-form Agreements, and to preserve for the Declarant the full measure of statutory protection notwithstanding mechanical assent.

7.2 Ambiguities shall be resolved against the drafter of the instrument under interpretation.

7.3 If any portion of this Instrument is held unenforceable, the remainder shall continue in effect, and the unenforceable portion shall be given effect to the maximum extent possible.

Article VIII — Term, Amendment, and Authentication

8.1 This Instrument takes effect upon execution and remains in effect until revoked in a signed writing.

8.2 The Declarant may amend this Instrument by publishing a signed successor version bearing an incremented version number; the successor version supersedes this Instrument upon publication.

8.3 This Instrument may be executed in counterparts, including by electronic signature, and each counterpart is an original.

8.4 Canonical publication: https://notconsent.com/

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, the Declarant has executed this Instrument.

Signature: ______________________
Printed Name: ______________________
Date: ______________________
Jurisdiction of Residence: ______________________

Annex A — Explanatory Notes

(Not part of the Instrument. For readers, signers, and counterparties.)

A.1 Legal effect — stated honestly. This Instrument does not void a clickwrap. Courts enforce click-through agreements without regard to whether the user read them, and a unilateral document cannot rewrite a bilateral one. Its realistic functions are: (a) a dated record of protest and non-assent-in-spirit, potentially relevant to unconscionability arguments; (b) invocation of statutory privacy rights (GDPR Art. 21 objections; CCPA/CPRA opt-outs; comparable regimes), where specific objections like §3.2–3.4 are how a data protection officer must log a request; (c) evidence in regulatory complaints; (d) a political instrument — a mass-signed, uniform statement makes the illegitimacy of standard-form agreements countable.

A.2 Design choices. The body deliberately avoids: claims that a click is void (unsupportable, and the hallmark of documents courts mock); sovereign-citizen vocabulary (credibility poison); and vague “I do not consent” formulas (logged by counterparties as noise). Every objection is drafted as either a limit on construction, a statutory invocation, or a record of position — the three forms that can actually do work.

A.3 Why formal drafting. The genre of this document is itself the message: it imposes on the Counterparty the same burden standard-form agreements impose on users. A one-page diatribe is ignorable; a structured instrument with definitions, a schedule of objections, and a notices provision must be processed — and processing a million of them is the point.

A.4 Deployment guidance. Sign once, publish the canonical URL (§8.4), and reference the URL in signup flows, privacy@ / dpo@ correspondence, and disputes. For per-service use, pair it with a short cover email invoking the specific statutory opt-outs — §3.2 (AI training), §3.3 (data sale), §4.2 (opt-out architecture) — because statutory invocations create obligations; the rest creates a record.

A.5 Known limits. Counterparties will not read or honor this voluntarily. Its value scales with the number of signers and the visibility of the registry. Absent regulatory or legislative adoption of its demands (plain-language primacy, granular consent, diff-based change notice, length standards), it functions as testimony, not shield.

Release terms: CC0 1.0 (public domain). Fork it, translate it, shorten it, improve it. If you publish an improved version, keep the version number incrementing so signers know what they signed.

The Consent Manifesto · companion guide

The plain-language guide

This guide explains the Declaration clause by clause. It is not part of the Declaration. You don’t need to read the full legal text to sign — but if you want to know what you’re signing, this is the place.

The big picture first

What is this document? Every time you sign up for an app, a streaming service, a game, or a smart TV, you click “I Agree” to a wall of legal text. Nobody reads it. Nobody could read it — some terms of service are longer than a novel. This Declaration is a formal, signed statement that says: “I click because I have no choice. I only agree to what the service actually needs to work. Here is my list of objections to everything else.”

What can it actually do? (We promise not to oversell this.)

  • It will not magically void the agreement you clicked. Courts enforce click-through agreements whether you read them or not. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something.
  • It creates a dated record that you objected — useful if a dispute ever turns on “but you agreed!”
  • It formally invokes privacy rights you already have under laws like GDPR (Europe) or CCPA (California) — these do create real legal obligations, like demanding your data not be sold or used to train AI.
  • It counts you. One signed declaration is a curiosity. A million signed declarations is a movement that regulators and lawmakers cannot ignore.

Think of it as a receipt for your objections. The receipt doesn’t force the store to change its policy — but you can’t demand a refund without one.

Article I — Definitions

“Qualified Assent”

Plain words “Yes, I clicked agree — but only in the sense that I pressed the button, not in the sense that I truly accepted everything in it.”

Example When you swipe your transit card, you’re not personally endorsing the transit authority’s management philosophy. You’re paying to get to work. Your tap of the card is qualified — it means “I need this service,” nothing more.

“Operational Necessity”

Plain words The magic measuring stick. A term is okay if the service literally cannot work without it. Everything else is on the objections list.

Example A photo app needs permission to store your photos — that’s operational necessity. It does not need the right to sell your face prints to advertisers — that’s just greed wearing a lanyard.

“Anti-Consumer Functionality”

Plain words Anything in the terms that hurts you beyond what the service needs to function.

Example A flashlight app demanding access to your contacts. The flashlight works fine without knowing who your friends are. That gap — between what it needs and what it takes — is the anti-consumer part.

“Material Change”

Plain words Any change to the deal that alters your rights, your obligations, or what they do with your data.

Example Moving a button isn’t material. Quietly adding “we may now analyze your private messages to train our AI” is material.

“Notice”

Plain words Companies love to claim they “notified” you by burying an announcement on a help page you’ve never visited. This definition says that doesn’t count. Notice means telling you what changed and why, in plain language, before it happens, somewhere you’ll actually see it.

Example “We’ve updated our terms!” is not notice — it’s a fortune cookie. “Starting March 1, we will share your purchase history with data brokers so we can sell it; here’s how to leave with your data” — that’s notice.

Article II — Qualified Assent (the core move)

Plain words Everything you click counts only for what the service genuinely needs to function. Where the agreement bundles a hundred unrelated things into one “I Agree,” you’re only accepting the essentials — the rest, you object to (that’s Article IV).

Example The toaster. See above — you accepted toast. The kitchen photos, the lawsuit waiver, and the Delaware trips came in the same box; you didn’t order them.

Article III — Your content and your data

3.1 — Licenses to your stuff

Plain words If you upload something (a photo, a review, a video), the company may use it only as much as needed to run the service — and that permission dies when the service does, and can’t be handed to others for profit.

Example Posting a photo to a photo-sharing site means they can display it to you and other users. It does not mean they can put your sunset photo on a bus advertisement, sell it to a stock agency, or keep using it after you delete your account.

3.2 — No AI training

Plain words They may not feed your content, messages, or behavior into AI training.

Example An artist posts 2,000 drawings to an art community. Two years later she discovers “her style” has been swallowed whole by an AI image generator that now competes with her for commissions. Section 3.2 is the artist’s signed “no” — recorded before it happened.

3.3 — No selling your data

Plain words Your personal data can’t be sold, rented, or brokered to third parties, unless the service literally cannot work without that specific transfer.

Example A navigation app sends your location to a map server — necessary, that’s the whole product. The same app selling your location history to an insurance company so your driving premiums go up? That’s the difference between a tool and a wiretap.

3.4 — No biometric snooping

Plain words No collecting face scans, voiceprints, precise location tracking, or behavior profiles beyond what the service needs.

Example A smart doorbell needs to see who’s at the door. It doesn’t need to build a database of every face that walks past your house, tagged and searchable, kept forever.

3.5 — Your statutory rights stay on

Plain words You’re formally invoking every legal right you already have — to see your data, delete it, take it with you, and object to processing.

Example This is the part with real teeth today. Under GDPR, a company that receives this and keeps selling your data anyway can be fined. Under California law, your “do not sell” request must be honored. This clause is the formal handshake that triggers those machines.

Article IV — The schedule of objections (the hit list)

Fourteen categories of provision the Declaration objects to. Tap any of them for the plain words and an example.

4.1 Forced arbitration

Plain words Many terms say: “You can never take us to court, never join a class action — any dispute goes to a private arbitrator we effectively choose.”

Example A bank’s app charges hidden fees to 2 million customers, $30 each. That’s $60 million — but only if the victims can group together. With arbitration clauses, each person must fight alone, in a private process that costs more than the $30. Result: nobody sues, and the bank keeps the money. That’s not a dispute system; it’s a get-out-of-accountability-free card.

4.2 Opt-out trickery

Plain words Companies enable harmful features by default and hide the off-switch, betting you’ll never find it. This section flips it: harmful features stay OFF unless you turn them ON, separately, knowingly.

Example A social network launches with “we may use your posts to train our AI” switched on and the off-switch buried in Settings > Privacy > Data > AI Preferences > Advanced > Manage (four menus deep, behind a modal that says “Are you sure? Your experience may be worse”). That’s not a choice; it’s a maze with an exit painted on the wall.

4.3 Forced updates

Plain words A company may not push updates to hardware you own that remove features, slow it down, or break compatibility — without your approval of each update.

Example You buy a $2,000 “smart” blender. A firmware update arrives; your blender now requires a subscription to blend at full speed, and the “smoothie” setting is gone. Or a carmaker remotely downgrades horsepower on used models to upsell new ones. You paid for a blender, not a blender-shaped rented permission slip.

4.4 “You don’t own anything”

Plain words The great digital heist: you “buy” a book, movie, or game, but the fine print says you only licensed it — and the license can be revoked. This section says: if you sold it as a purchase and a reasonable person would think they own it, then they own it. And it protects your right to repair, modify, and resell your things.

Example Someone buys 800 ebooks over fifteen years. The retailer loses a licensing deal; overnight, every book vanishes from their device — including the one they were reading. (This has actually happened.) No refund, no warning, no recourse. They “bought” the books the way you “buy” a seat that someone else can remove from under you.

4.5 Silent mutation

Plain words They can’t change the deal without telling you what changed, why, and giving you a real chance to say “no thanks, I’m leaving — give me my data and my prepaid money.”

Example A cloud storage service offers “unlimited storage, $99/year.” Ten million people build their digital lives on it. Then a quiet terms update: “We may now terminate accounts we deem ‘excessive.’” No notice of what that means, no export window. This section demands the diff, in advance, with an exit.

4.6 Bundle-or-nothing

Plain words Refusing unrelated terms can’t lock you out of the service.

Example To send a message to your grandmother on a messaging app, you must also agree to arbitration, data sales, and AI training. Your grandmother is on that app and no other. Is that agreement? That’s a hostage situation with a EULA.

4.7 The Nile-length agreement

Plain words Terms so long, so dense, or so buried that no reasonable person could review them at signup aren’t agreement — they’re camouflage.

Example A game’s terms of service: 42,000 words, 11-point gray font, with the clause letting them delete your account without reason on page 38. Researchers calculated it would take the average person about 76 working days a year to read every privacy policy they encounter. The length is the strategy: compliance by exhaustion.

4.8 Blame-shifting

Plain words Companies can’t disclaim blame for their own negligence or law-breaking, can’t cap their liability below the harm they foreseeably cause, and can’t make you pay their legal bills.

Example A fitness tracker’s terms say the company is “not liable for any harm arising from use of the product.” Its battery catches fire and burns your nightstand. Under those terms — if they were honored — you’d also owe them attorney’s fees for the inconvenience of suing them. Article 4.8 declines that arrangement.

4.9 Termination on a whim

Plain words They can’t delete your account, with no reason, no warning, no appeal, and no way to get your data out.

Example A photographer’s portfolio account — twelve years of work, her livelihood — vanishes. Support replies with a form email: “Per Section 14.3, we may suspend accounts at our sole discretion.” No reason given, because none is needed under the terms. Every photo, gone. This section demands: reason, notice, appeal, export.

4.10 Taking the money and running

Plain words If they kill a service or remove content you paid for, you get your unspent money back and time to export your stuff.

Example You prepay $300/year for a software suite. Eight months in, the company announces shutdown, effective in 30 days — keep using it? No. Refund of the unused four months? “Refer to Section 9(b): all fees non-refundable.” You paid for a year; you received eight months; they keep $100 for nothing. Article 4.10 names that for what it is.

4.11 Subscription traps

Plain words If signing up takes one click, canceling must too. And they must remind you before auto-renewing.

Example You subscribe to a meal-kit service in 30 seconds. Canceling takes 45 minutes: a phone call (only weekdays 10–2), a retention script, three “are you sure” pages, and a final survey. This is called a “roach motel” in the industry — easy to check in, hard to check out. Article 4.11 installs a door that swings both ways.

4.12 Rigged courts

Plain words They can’t shorten the deadline to sue them, force you to litigate in a courthouse 3,000 miles away, or make you waive rights the law says you keep.

Example A small online seller’s terms require all disputes in a specific county in Delaware. You live in Montana; the disputed charge is $85. Getting to Delaware costs $900. The clause isn’t a forum-selection preference — it’s a wall with a tollbooth. Also banned here: “you must sue within 6 months” (statutes give you years) and “you waive all rights to a jury.”

4.13 Gag orders

Plain words They can’t forbid you from telling the truth about them.

Example A smart thermostat has a known defect. The company’s terms threaten legal action against reviewers who “disparage the product.” You post an honest review describing the defect; you get a cease-and-desist citing Section 11.4. Article 4.13 says factual criticism is not defamation, and contracts can’t make it so.

4.14 The catch-all

Plain words Companies are inventive. Whatever new scheme they invent that screws users but isn’t on this list yet, it’s covered here too.

Example Nobody saw “we own a royalty on items you sell in your own livestreams” coming. Clause 4.14 is the net under the net.

Article V — How and when this applies

Plain words It covers every agreement you accept after signing, and every renewal or change to older deals. Companies are officially on notice via the public URL — publishing it there counts as telling the world. If your Declaration conflicts with their terms, yours wins as much as the law allows; if their terms conflict with the law, the law wins.

Example Think of it as planting a flag: from this date forward, every counterparty is presumed to have seen the flag. They can’t later claim “we never knew you objected” — it’s on the record, timestamped, public.

Article VI — Reservation of rights

Plain words “I reserve everything I didn’t explicitly give up. Paying you, using you, or clicking agree — while objecting — does not mean I surrendered. Even after signing, nothing they write later counts as me agreeing to it.”

Example You keep paying your gym while a dispute over a new “mandatory locker-fee” brews, because you need the gym. Article VI is the paperwork equivalent of taping a note to your payment: this check is not consent. It stops the company from arguing “well, you kept paying, so you must have accepted the new fee.”

Article VII — Interpretation rules

Plain words Three standard legal tools pointed in your favor: (1) the document’s purpose is to expose the consent problem, so interpret it that way; (2) ambiguities count against whoever drafted the confusing text (this rule — contra proferentem — is centuries old); (3) if one part is struck down, the rest survives.

Example Their terms say you grant a license to “use” your content — but they claim “use” means “display, modify, sell, sublicense, and train AI.” Under rule (2), the drafter who wrote a vague word eats the ambiguity, not you. They wrote it; they own its fuzziness.

Article VIII — Term, changes, and signing

Plain words It starts when you sign and lasts until you revoke it in writing. You can update it by publishing a new version with a higher number (so it’s always clear which version you signed). Electronic signatures count.

Example Suppose next year’s version adds a clause about some new technology — brain-computer interfaces, quantum advertising, whatever arrives. You publish Version 2.0, it supersedes 1.0, and everyone can see exactly what changed and when. The document practices on itself what it demands of companies: notice of changes.

Deployment · §8.3, Annex A.4

Sign it, use it

The Declaration only does work if it exists, is dated, and is pointed at. Four steps.

  1. Sign it

    Print the Declaration, or copy the signature block. Electronic signature counts (§8.3). Record your name, the date, and your jurisdiction of residence. It takes effect on execution and lasts until you revoke it in writing (§8.1).

  2. Point at this page

    Reference https://notconsent.com/ in signup flows, emails to privacy@ / dpo@ addresses, and any dispute. Publication is Notice under §5.2 — counterparties are charged with knowledge as of the publication date.

  3. Pull the statutory levers

    For per-service use, pair it with a short cover email invoking the specific opt-outs — statutory invocations create obligations; the rest creates a record. A template is below.

  4. Share it

    Its power grows with signatures, not with legal force. One signed declaration is a curiosity; a million is a movement.

The clauses with teeth today

These are the objections that map onto obligations companies already have, right now.

ClauseWhat it doesStatutory lever
§3.2Refuses consent to AI training on your content, messages, and behaviorGDPR Art. 21 objection; CCPA/CPRA opt-out — a DPO must log this as a request
§3.3Refuses consent to the sale, sharing, or brokerage of your personal data“Do not sell or share” under CCPA/CPRA and comparable regimes
§3.4Refuses biometrics, precise geolocation, and behavioral profiling beyond operational necessityBiometric privacy statutes (e.g., Illinois BIPA); GDPR Art. 9 special-category data
§3.5 + Art. VIInvokes access, deletion, portability, correction, and objection rights in fullGDPR Arts. 15–21; CCPA/CPRA consumer rights
§4.2Demands default-OFF for any functionality beyond operational necessityDark-pattern and consent rules (GDPR consent standards; FTC dark-pattern guidance)

Cover email template

Send to a service’s privacy@ or dpo@ address when you want a specific objection logged. Adapt as needed — the specific citations are what do the work.

Annex A, in question form

Honest questions

The Declaration is unusually honest about its own limits. So is this page.

Will this void the agreements I’ve already clicked?

No. Courts enforce click-through agreements without regard to whether the user read them, and a unilateral document cannot rewrite a bilateral one. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something (Annex A.1).

Then what is the point?

Four things, honestly stated: (a) a dated record of protest that may matter in an unconscionability argument; (b) invocation of statutory privacy rights — GDPR Article 21 objections, CCPA/CPRA opt-outs — which do create obligations a data protection officer must log; (c) evidence in regulatory complaints; (d) a political instrument: a mass-signed, uniform statement makes the illegitimacy of standard-form agreements countable (Annex A.1).

Is this sovereign-citizen stuff?

No — and the document deliberately avoids everything that genre does: no claims that a click is “void,” no pseudo-legal vocabulary, no vague “I do not consent” formulas (which counterparties log as noise). Every objection is drafted as one of the three forms that can actually do work: a limit on construction, a statutory invocation, or a record of position (Annex A.2).

Why is it so formal?

The genre is the message. It imposes on the counterparty the same burden standard-form agreements impose on users. A one-page diatribe is ignorable; a structured instrument with definitions, a schedule of objections, and a notices provision must be processed — and processing a million of them is the point (Annex A.3).

Does it cover agreements I signed before publishing it?

It applies to each agreement accepted after publication, and to each renewal, extension, or Material Change of any pre-existing relationship (§5.1).

Won’t companies just ignore it?

Voluntarily? Yes — counterparties will not read or honor it. Its value scales with the number of signers and the visibility of the registry. Absent regulatory or legislative adoption of its demands, it functions as testimony, not shield (Annex A.5). That is exactly why the last step is “share it.”

Can I modify, translate, or fork it?

Yes — it is released under CC0 1.0 (public domain). Fork it, translate it, shorten it, improve it. If you publish an improved version, keep the version number incrementing so signers know what they signed (§8.2, release note).

Does this website collect anything from me?

No cookies, no analytics, no trackers, no third-party requests of any kind. A site about consent should practice it. This page takes nothing from you.