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.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.”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.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.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.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.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.)