Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, pointed out that the internet is at a very different point than it should be, and new approaches must be introduced for this. Speaking with Fujitsu CTO Vivek Mahajan at the Fujitsu ActivateNow Summit, Berners-Lee suggested that the Web has moved away from its original focus: “I thought the Web should be for everything and everyone. It was really important that it was computer, network, and language independent. But we need to make sure users have a really helpful and constructive web, and we have a lot of things to fix.”
The solution to these problems, Berners-Lee says, is decentralized data stores, called Solid Pods, that give users granular control over who is granted access to their private data. For this purpose, his company, Inrupt, aims to expand access to Solid Pods data centers and establish partnerships based on mutual trust by collaborating with governments and private companies.
In an ideal world, says Berners-Lee, the individual should have the power to freely use the entire spectrum of data, from public data to private information such as medical results, and control what data is shared. He also states that smartphones, tablets, and other devices should serve their owners, not the companies that made them or the operating system on them: “When you ask a device who it works for, the answer should not be: It should be able to get it to lure you into buying things you wouldn’t otherwise buy. a big company that gets all the data from you’.”
Finally, Berners-Lee says, “When shopping online or planning how we will spend our day, the tool we do this with should make recommendations, putting the owner’s interests first. Our technology is aimed at individual use.”
29137
