MIT Technology Review Subscribe

Tim Berners-Lee wants to remake the web to help you protect your data

The World Wide Web’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, has launched a way to make it easier for people to control their personal data. Will it take off?

The news: Berners-Lee is working with people at MIT and beyond on a startup called Inrupt, which runs an open-source project, Solid, that hands you back control over your own data.

Advertisement

How will it work? Decentralization and control are the central principles. Solid will let developers create decentralized apps that run on data fully owned by users. They decide where to store their data and whom to share it with. The first wave of apps being built on Solid is being developed now. “I’m incredibly optimistic for this next era of the web,” said Berners-Lee in a post on Medium.

This story is only available to subscribers.

Don’t settle for half the story.
Get paywall-free access to technology news for the here and now.

Subscribe now Already a subscriber? Sign in
You’ve read all your free stories.

MIT Technology Review provides an intelligent and independent filter for the flood of information about technology.

Subscribe now Already a subscriber? Sign in

Good luck: The plan is very ambitious. Its success will hinge on whether enough people adopt it beyond just hard-core techies. It’s well timed in the week of Facebook’s data breach, though, and the fact that it’s the brainchild of Berners-Lee can’t hurt either.

This is your last free story.
Sign in Subscribe now

Your daily newsletter about what’s up in emerging technology from MIT Technology Review.

Please, enter a valid email.
Privacy Policy
Submitting...
There was an error submitting the request.
Thanks for signing up!

Our most popular stories

Advertisement