The solution for your online privacy?
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the internet, director at the world wide web consortium and professor at MIT has an Idea to revolutionize the internet. His plan is to give power over personal data back to the customer. Nowadays, the digital giants of this world still control all your data, but that is not how Tim Berners-Lee had originally envisioned the internet. The timing for releasing his new idea to the world was impeccable. Facebook just released a day earlier that data had been breached of nearly 50 million customers.
In a blog post on the website Medium he clarified his idea. Tim Berners-Lee wants to give the customer power over its own data again. To reach this goal he has created Solid which is a new open-source technology that has decentralization and control as central principles. Solid is a platform based on the existing web. On this platform users will be able to decide which apps can use what of your personal data. This works by putting all your personal data in some kind of pod. Customers will be able to store their pod personally or at a specialized service provider. Users will be able to select which kind of data will be accessible by what kind of people. When an app wants to make use of your own data they will have to make a special request to your pod. This will be in the interests of customers as no website, app or social network will own any of your personal data anymore.
According to Tim Berners-Lee this technology will unleash incredible opportunities for commerce and it will empower developers to build trusted, innovative and beneficial applications. For the first Solid apps customers will need to wait about a year.
Do you think this idea will revolutionize the way we store data, and will this undermine the strategy of the current digital giants?
Sources:
Tim Berners-Lee launched his vision for an alternative web, and his timing was impeccable
View at Medium.com
http://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20181001_03799969
Interesting! So do companies still decide which aspects of the customer get tracked, however, we get that information stored in our pod? I also wonder if people might not get overloaded with having to decide which website gets what info about them each time or if they just have a general amount of info they wish to share with all companies.
I am strongly interested in that topic. I believe every user of the internet (namely 55% of the world population) should have the right to have control over their data. When we talk about personal data, we encompass any aspects: It can be personal information such as names, genders, age, but it could also be more precise data such as its interests, hobbies, and preferences. Those type of information are easily identified by the user, and could therefore be included in Solid.
However, I believe a third type of data is crucial to companies and digital players but is difficult to grasp for users: the data related to internet consumption. Whether it is our frequency of usage or the type of websites and information sources users are consulting, such information is as valuable to tech companies (or even more). This is in my opinion, one of the limits of Solid, as users do not have access to such information themsleves, and will therefore not be able to gain control over it.