Tim Berners-Lee was one of the founders of the Internet and implemented the first successful communication between a client and a server using HTTP in 1989. He’s always been a proponent for an open Internet and doesn’t like how the web has changed. The biggest profits on the web today come from the sale of customer data.
Berners-Lee has launched a new company along with cybersecurity expert John Bruce that proposes to ‘restore rightful ownership of the data back to every web user”. The new start-up is called Inrupt which is proposing to develop an alternate web for users who want to protect their data and their identity.
Berner-Lee has been working at the Computer Sciences and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT to develop a software platform that can support his new concept. The platform is called Solid, which has the main goal of decoupling web applications from the data they produce.
Today our personal data is stored all over the web. Our ISPs make copies of a lot of our data. Platforms like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter gather and store data on us. Each of these companies captures a little piece of the picture of who we each are. These companies use our data for their own purposes and then sell it to companies that buy, sort and compile that data to make profiles on all of us. I saw a disturbing statistic recently that there are now up to 1,400 data points created daily for the typical data user every day – data gathered from our cellphones, smart devices, and our online web activity.
The Solid platform would change the fundamental structure of data storage. Each person on the Solid platform would create a cache of their own personal data. That data could be stored on personal servers or on servers supplied by companies that are part of the Solid cloud. The data would be encrypted and protected against prying.
Then, companies like Berners-Lee’s Inrupt would develop apps that perform functions users want without storing any customer data. Take the example of shopping for new health insurance. An insurance company that agrees to be part of the Solid platform would develop an app that would analyze your personal data to determine if you are a good candidate for the insurance policy. This app would work on your server to analyze your medical records and other relevant personal information. The app would do its analysis and decide if you are a good candidate for a policy. It might report information back to the insurance company such as some sort of rating of you as a potential customer, but the insurance would never see the personal data.
The Solid concept is counting on the proposition that there are a lot of people who don’t want to share their personal data on the open web. Berners-Lee is banking that there are plenty of developers who would design applications for those in the Solid community. Over time the Solid-based apps can provide an alternate web for the privacy-minded, separate and apart from the data-collection web we share today.
Berners-Lee expects that this will first take a foothold in industry groups that value privacy like coders, lawyers, CPAs, investment advisors, etc. Those industries have a strong desire to keep their client’s data private, and there is no better way to do that than by having the client keep their own data. This relieves lawyers, CPAs and other professionals from the ever-growing liabilities from data breaches of client data.
Over time Berners-Lee hopes that all sorts of other platforms will want to cater to a growing base of privacy-minded users. He’s hoping for a web ecosystem of search engines, news feeds, social media platforms, and shopping sites that want to sell software and services to Solid users, but with the promise of not gathering personal data. One would think current existing privacy-minded platforms like Mozilla Firefox would join this community. I would love to see a Solid-based cellphone operating system. I’d love to use an ISP that is part of this effort.
It’s an interesting concept and one I’ll be watching. I am personally uneasy about the data being gathered on each of us. I don’t like the idea of applying for health insurance, a credit card or a home mortgage and being judged in secret by data that is purchased about me on the web. None of us has any idea of the validity and correctness of such data. And I doubt that anybody wants to be judged by somebody like a mortgage lender using non-financial data like our politics, our web searches, or the places we visit in person as reported by our cellphones. We now live in a surveillance world and Berners-Lee is giving us the hope of escaping that world.