How world wide web inventor Tim Berners-Lee plans to break Big Tech's chokehold on your personal data
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, is on a mission to redesign it.
On Monday,
In 2018, Berners-Lee announced his intention to help build a fairer, more decentralized internet using an open-source project he was working on, called Solid.
Solid aims to make people's data massively more portable, giving individuals far more control over how all their personal data moves around the internet.When Berners-Lee announced the launch of Solid in 2018, he simultaneously announced the creation of a company to go with it, called Inrupt. Since then, Inrupt has grown to a team of 29 developers, CEO
In his blog post, Berners-Lee said these "silos" are ripe for exploitation, "leading to increasing, very reasonable, public skepticism about how personal data is being misused."
Berners-Lee hopes that Inrupt can help serve consumers who are used to having their personal data hoovered up and occasionally mishandled by Big Tech companies like Facebook.
The goal of Solid isn't to lock up people's data where social media giants can't find it. Instead, the idea is to make it much easier for individuals to control where their data can go, using various personalized hubs it calls "pods."
"It's not just about privacy, it's actually about enablement. About a year ago a lot of people were writing in the business press about privacy and imagining that the user's desire is to hoard [...] But when they get into Solid then really the empowering thing is about being able to use their data," he said.
For the near future though, Solid's use case is more to do with system architecture, giving clients a better way to join together data they already possess."They take pieces of data about you and write it into your pod, your storage area. So now when you go visit your doctor, you can take it all with you and you can say, look, there's everything about me, a holistic view of my health experience. And now they can make a better diagnoses," Bruce told Business Insider.
The partnerships with the NHS and other organizations are still early days and quite small scale, Bruce said. The aim is to nail the applications for now, rather than pursue bigger projects."I don't think overmuch about 'wow how are we going to build a huge, scaleable business here.' It's much more about how do we really get after this, and deliver the kind of promise that we believe we can, make these use cases fly, be really successful, and we'll figure all the rest out," he said.
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