When it comes to any discussion of the Web, a good place to start would be with Tim Berners-Lee. Working at CERN during the 1980’s, Tim was part of a team working on writing computer code for the operation/management of the large hadron collider. It turned out there was a lot of data to keep track of. The problem was that data from different teams were siloed within each team and within each team, some data may have been stored on magnetic tape, some data printed out on reams of paper, some data might be saved on an 8-inch IBM floppy disk. And so on. To make matters even worse, CERN hosted scientists from more than twenty countries, with everyone pursuing a common scientific goal but without a common language. Data management-wise, it was a mess.
Tim’s flash of inspiration was to develop a set of protocols and standards (HTTP, HTML and URL, primarily) that allowed computers (and their users) to talk to each other, regardless of document type, document language, format, etc. And in a nutshell, there you have the World Wide Web.
In a stroke generosity, Tim put the ownership of the new web standards under the control of a non-profit and shared the foundational blocks of the web with the entire world, for free. Ever since then, he has been in a running battle with the Facebooks, Microsofts, Xs, Amazons, and SnapChats of the world to keep the web open and free.
To that end, Tim’s current efforts focus on the data sovereignty of individuals. When someone likes, comments, or posts on Facebook, that activity and data should belong to the individual, not Facebook. Facebook should not be allowed to gather and package user data and auction it off to the highest bidder. Also, why am I not able to see my Facebook activity in the same space as my LinkedIn activity? And why do I currently have four different airline apps on my phone, where I had to enter the exact same security information into each one individually? Why can’t I have a centralized data repository, like a wallet, whereby I grant access to third parties so that all of my data is both under my control and in one place? This is what Tim is aiming for with his Social Linked Data (Solid) set of protocols. Untenable? Maybe. There is a massive headwind blowing in a different direction. And yet, the entire population of Flanders (the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium) has been set up with a data pod/wallet, sponsored by their government. Shocking! Especially if you are a good American who believes that the government (and not Facebook and X and Microsoft) is the ultimate enemy.
To that end, I’ve been plinkalating around with setting up by own Solid pod, but with limited success so far. I still need to do more exploring, but do feel free to bop around on Inrupt (Berners-Lee’s jab at everything “innovate” and “disrupt” based): https://www.inrupt.com/wallets/data-wallets
Even though it looks like an uphill trudge, I am firmly in the camp that we, as citizens and consumers, should stop paying some of the world’s largest companies to steal our information. Radical, I know, but there it is.
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