Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid is a platform designed to re-decentralize the web
It’s amazing to me that a huge component of the problems TBL and colleagues are trying to solve are not discussed in the article, or here: we exchange our data to access services that are valuable, and expensive to develop to maintain.<p>Because our personal data is incorporated into a highly networked system (the various ad platforms), is worth much more than if it isolated, or “decentralized.”<p>Unless a new system, that allows individuals more fine grained control over how their data is designed to aggregate with mass numbers of other users’ data, this personal data will have a marginal value approaching zero.<p>This implies that other means of financing the vast client-server system,that is increasingly dominant in the first and second world societies, will have to be found.<p>It will also require pretty restrictive regulation to prevent companies from simply proceeding as they are, aggregating mass quantities of user data, from which they profit.<p>While awareness of the problems, potential and real, is slowly dawning amongst the “civilian” population, it is a confused and ill- informed type of concern.<p>I’m thinking of friends who get upset at learning the government is spying on everyone, who simultaneously post countless intimate details of their lives on Facebook (or Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, etc.)