This Tweet concerns the intention of a MIT-based project called Solid to “to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy.”
‘Solid’ is an abbreviation of ‘socially-linked data’, and the project, overseen by Tim Berners-Lee, sees socially-linked data to arise from and for “a proposed set of conventions and tools for building decentralized social applications based on Linked Data principles”. It’s key principles are ‘true data ownership’, ‘modular design’ and ‘reusing existing data’.
Earlier in my Lifestream, I reported and reflected upon Berners-Lee’s 2017 open letter calling for sustained freedom freedom and privacy on the web. Now, as the Lifestream moves towards the end of EDC, here lies a key issue for the future of the internet – to avoid becoming the splinternet.
There are many other issues and factors coalescing around the notion of ‘splintenet’, which is unsurprising given the complexities of the internet’s assemblage potential. Tim Berners-Lee acknowledged some of these in a speech this week given when accepting the Turing Award. This Guardian piece reports and locates some of this complexity, in an interview with Berners-Lee:
An alphabet of future risk begins to take shape:
- A = advertising
- B = buying and selling data
- C = clickbait
- D = Donald Trump
- and so on.
Let’s hope that all that is Solid does not melt into air.
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