Internet creator Tim Berners-La launched the Solid project to protect user data

The creator of the Internet Professor Tim Berners-Lee presented his new project called Solid . Solid - reduction from the Social Linked Data, a set of standards and tools for creating decentralized applications based on the principles of interconnected data.

The project is built on the modular architecture of data storage and is implemented by specialists of the Institute of Technology in Massachusetts (MIT) and the Qatari Institute of Computer Research.

“Now we have a situation where people cannot control what is happening with their data, and also cannot use it normally, since they are distributed among many different websites,” says Tim Berners-li that it was precisely to be engaged in this topic. - Just give the world a technology and hope that people themselves will do it themselves. But we expect that the project will become an ecosystem that is beneficial to both developers and users. ”

The purpose of the project is to change the method of web applications and strengthen the protection of personal data. How should it work? User data can be stored in Personal Online Data Stores, and not as now, on Google or Facebook servers. These companies own servers, which means they own your data. If someone creates a new application or service, he can apply for data to the user, and he decides whether to give the right to use them.

Solid principles:

- real rights to data: the user has the right to choose where his data is stored, who has admission to them;

- modular device: since the applications are separated from the data that they produce, users will be able to avoid dependence on one service provider, switching their application from one data storage to another without any losses;

- repeated use of existing data: developers will be able to create new applications or improve existing ones using the data that have already been created by other applications

The project’s website provides examples of trial applications. Among them there is Plume, a blogging platform in which all data is stored separately from the application. The application sending notifications by e -mail about new letters, while it does not transmit the data itself, but only information about it. Or an application for contact management, where the address book is built on the principles of Solid.

The Technological Institute in Massachusetts received a grant of $ 1 million from MasterCard, which became the basis for financing the project.

Solid