Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW, has a plan to save your privacy

Computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, is worried about the privacy of future internet generations.

In an interview with BBC Science Focus Magazine, Lee expressed concern about privacy and personal data. “Using private information, they’ve built a profile of you and know exactly who you are. They know the lies they can spin you that could lead you up the garden path – things that may be political, commercial or criminal.”, says Lee.

Despite this, people are not concerned about their privacy daily. According to Lee, only the big breaches make people think about how to protect their data better.

Stand out from the crowd! Check out now if you’ve been exposed in a breach with Bitdefender’s Digital Identity protection tool.

Solid about fixing the Internet

Berners-Lee has a plan to save his invention, and you, from privacy abuses. The name of the project is Solid, a new system, a decentralized version of the Internet.

The platform will allow you to store your private information in Personal Online Data Stores (PODS) which you have full power over. Services and companies will have to ask permission to use specific information from your PODS – permission that you can remove at any time.

“Solid is different from what we currently know because of its collaborative potential,” said Berners-Lee. “For instance, if you are on a video call, you and whoever you’re speaking to could be using whatever video call app you like. People struggle with this at the moment: the idea that you don’t have to do a back end, that if you built a website you wouldn’t have to make a database to store customer data. It’s because PODS will provide a standardised protected data set.”

Read the full interview here.

What do you think about the idea? Will Solid fix the Internet’s data leak problem? How can you protect your digital identity today?

Share your thoughts in the comments section.