World Wide Web creator, Tim Berners-Lee, sad to see his invention being used for evil, hatches plan to take it back

[Delicieuxz]

Tim Berners-Lee’s plan to save the internet: give us back control of our data

Quote

Releasing his creation for free 30 years ago, the inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, famously declared: “this is for everyone”. Today, his invention is used by billions – but it also hosts the authoritarian crackdowns of antidemocratic governments, and supports the infrastructure of the most wealthy and powerful companies on Earth.

 

Now, in an effort to return the internet to the golden age that existed before its current incarnation as Web 2.0 – characterised by invasive data harvesting by governments and corporations – Berners-Lee has devised a plan to save his invention.

This involves his brand of “data sovereignty” – which means giving users power over their data – and it means wrestling back control of the personal information we surrendered to big tech many years ago.

 

Berners-Lee’s latest intervention comes as increasing numbers of people regard the online world as a landscape dominated by a few tech giants, thriving on a system of “surveillance capitalism” – which sees our personal data extracted and harvested by online giants before being used to target advertisements at us as we browse the web.

 

 

World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee takes on Google, Facebook, Amazon to fix the internet

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"The next wave is about artificial intelligence," Verdegem said. "Companies and governments will use all that data to train algorithms to come up with better deep learning models. And as (Russian President) Vladimir Putin once said, the person who is in charge of artificial intelligence will dominate the world."

 

But Berners-Lee and his business partner, John Bruce, have come up with an alternative to fight back against this consolidation of power.

 

They have launched a startup company, Inrupt.com, that allows consumers, rather than companies, to control their own data, to store it in pods and to move it wherever they please.

 

That means Facebook, Google or any other Big Tech company will no longer be able to extract an individual's photos, comments or purchase history without asking. All of that will be stored on a pod, and the individual can share the information with the company if he or she chooses.

 

"We are on a mission to change the way the web works, to make it a better place for all of us," said Berners-Lee in a November YouTube video with Technology Intelligence Live. "It's a mid-course correction to restore the values of individual and group empowerment that the internet used to have and seems to have lost."

 

Quote

Verdegem, who recently wrote about Inrupt in The Conversation, said his main criticism of the company is that an individual's data isn't worth that much. It's only in the aggregate that data is really valuable to a company like Google or Facebook.

 

But maybe that's not the way data should be looked at anyway, Verdegem said. It should be looked at as something that's not owned by individuals or companies, but by society.

That sounds like a silly conclusion, to me. Yes, personal data shouldn't be looked-at firstly as monetary value, because it isn't firstly a monetary thing and it has no monetary value if it isn't for sale per the will of the person who owns it. But no, personal data isn't owned by society, each individual person's personal data is owned by them. Suggesting it is owned by society sounds like a way to concede that it doesn't belong to corporations while rationalizing that industries should have some means of access to it all the same.

 

 

In general, I think that Tim Berners-Lee's plan is a positive idea, compared to where things are. But I think that most of that data should be prohibited by law from being collected and stored in the first place. And what happens if Inrupt's data-stores are hacked? There goes the privacy the privacy and personal control of one's data that the idea was meant to protect.

 

I think the issue needs to be addressed at its source rather than with a coping mechanism which I think would be destined to fail. At some point, likely even from the outset, governments would have gained access to that vault of information and the public likely won't know about it when it happens.

 

 

The business of harvesting data is a dirty, illegitimate, predatory, and hypocritical one. It is making money through the exploitation and manipulation of people and is a crime - and not just a moral one (though, it is definitely a moral one):

 

What do you think would happen if you were to hook a Bitcoin mining operation up to the electricity supply of some business you don't own, without their permission and without compensating them? If they found out, they would have you arrested and if the operation was significant, they'd sue you, and would probably get to seize any profits you'd made while using their electricity.

 

There's not really even a need to frame things in cryptocoin-mining terms. Imagine that you decided to start using various businesses computers, electricity, employee activities, software, housing, as data farms for your own project, just like they're doing with our PCs. Same thing's going to happen: You'll be arrested and charged, probably sued, and any profits you made will probably be seized and given to the corporation.

 

But tech companies are doing the same thing to us and they're not being punished for it in any way. In generating and harvesting data from our particular usage and via interaction with our devices, tech companies are using our electricity, our hardware, our storage and management of our hardware, our software, our time, our personal activity, for their own commercial purposes, and all without a commercial license. They're stealing. And it's crazy that it's been allowed to progress this far, that the public is in a stupor and doesn't understand that this isn't right.

 

Somehow, the public, governments, and regulators have been lured into a stupor and coma regarding the topic just because tech companies started doing these things before there was any understanding of them, and so now people feel like it's just the way things are. But that's like thinking that stealing what isn't yours and slavery are just the way things are.

 

Tech companies whose business is mining and selling data are stealing from us in the same way that a politician who steals millions of dollars out of the treasury is stealing from their constituents. Even though the millions of dollars they stole amounts to a few dollars, or even less than a dollar per person, the smallness of the stealing from each individual doesn't make it not stealing.

 

 

 

 

Some methods to reduce the amount of data being stolen from you and used for commercial and manipulative purposes include:

 

- Using DuckDuckGo for web searches. They don't share or store any personal data. DuckDuckGo also has a tracker-blocking privacy plugin for Chrome, FireFox, and Safari, as well as mobile browsers.

 

- Using only an Enterprise or LTSC edition of Windows 10 as they afford for lowering the amount of data Microsoft takes from you beyond what Home and Pro allow. And Microsoft is tracking every mouse-click you make in Windows 10.

 

- Using ProtonMail for you email. It has end-to-end encryption and your inbox is encrypted with a user encryption key so that ProtonMail can't view it, either.

 

- Installing Electronic Frontier Foundation's browser plugin Privacy Badger [2] [3], which blocks a lot of tracking scripts.

 

- Possibly using an ad-blocker to reduce the amount of tracking and advertisement scripts websites can run when you browse their website.

 

- Making use of FireFox browser's built-in Facebook-tracking-blocking feature.

 

- Using your iPhones built-in option to block all tracking by apps.

 

- Setting your DNS resolver to Cloudflare's free 1.1.1.1 service. This prevents your ISP from recording your activity and searches and selling it. Cloudflare doesn't collect or sell any of your data and doesn't record any IPs. Cloudflare also has a mobile app that sets your mobile internet usage to its 1.1.1.1 service. Cloudflare say of their 1.1.1.1 service:

Quote

Here’s the deal - we don’t store client IP addresses never, ever, and we only use query names for things that improve DNS resolver performance (such as prefill all caches based on popular domains in a region and/or after obfuscation, APNIC research).

 

Cloudflare will never store any information in our logs that identifies an end user, and all logs collected by our public resolver will be deleted within 24 hours. We will continue to abide by our privacy policy and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.

 

 

If you know of additional methods to secure your data and privacy, please share them.

[SupaKomputa]

well einstein said the same thing...

[camieabz]

2 hours ago, Delicieuxz said:

Some methods to reduce the amount of data being stolen from you and used for commercial and manipulative purposes include:

 

- Using DuckDuckGo for web searches. They don't store or collect any personal data.

- Using only an Enterprise or LTSC edition of Windows 10 as they afford for lowering the amount of data Microsoft takes from you beyond what Home and Pro allow. And Microsoft is tracking every mouse-click you make in Windows 10.

- Installing Electronic Frontier Foundation's browser plugin Privacy Badger [2] [3], which blocks a lot of tracking scripts.

- Possibly using an ad-blocker to reduce the amount of tracking and advertisement scripts websites can run when you browse their website.

- Making use of FireFox browser's built-in Facebook-tracking-blocking feature.

- Using your iPhones built-in option to block all tracking by apps.

- Setting your DNS resolver to Cloudflare's free 1.1.1.1 service. This prevents your ISP from recording your activity and searches and selling it. Cloudflare doesn't collect or sell any of your data and doesn't record any IPs. Cloudflare also has a mobile app that sets your mobile internet usage to its 1.1.1.1 service. Cloudflare say of their 1.1.1.1 service:

 

 

If you know of additional methods to secure your data and privacy, please share them.

Definitely (not possibly) using an ad-blocker, and drop the use of sites that force you to switch it off (possible exception being must-have sites that need you to allow cookies to progress, such as e-mail sites, although that's anti-consumer too). Also consider browsers that try to put privacy ahead of other factors.

 

I did a small study of how news media push a lot of trackers. When testing, some sites broke the testers, since they were so request-heavy. When testing with ABP (not my preferred choice of blocker), the footprint of the page dropped from between 20% and 65%, depending on the site. One or two smaller titles were very good, and had little advertising though. Nowadays, it's not so easy to send a program out there to test them. Almost all have a default cookies policy banner, which affects results.

 

Maybe I'm a little fanatical about ad-blocking. Here's an example from a UK news site of what I see (60% whitespace). I don't frequent the site, but it's a great adblock tester. I get 40%-55% of requests from there blocked, depending on the page. 

 

[Drama Lama]

he seems a little late

[Delicieuxz]

35 minutes ago, camieabz said:

Definitely (not possibly) using an ad-blocker, and drop the use of sites that force you to switch it off (possible exception being must-have sites that need you to allow cookies to progress, such as e-mail sites, although that's anti-consumer too). Also consider browsers that try to put privacy ahead of other factors.

 

I did a small study of how news media push a lot of trackers. When testing, some sites broke the testers, since they were so request-heavy. When testing with ABP (not my preferred choice of blocker), the footprint of the page dropped from between 20% and 65%, depending on the site. One or two smaller titles were very good, and had little advertising though. Nowadays, it's not so easy to send a program out there to test them. Almost all have a default cookies policy banner, which affects results.

 

Maybe I'm a little fanatical about ad-blocking. Here's an example from a UK news site of what I see (60% whitespace). I don't frequent the site, but it's a great adblock tester. I get 40%-55% of requests from there blocked, depending on the page. 

That would be Daily Mail. Their site is a hideous visual disaster if not using an ad-blocker, as if an ad virus was infecting the viewing system.

 

Here's how many ads and scripts ABP and Privacy Badger just blocked on one Daily Mail page:

 

 

They prevent reading when using ABP, so I have to disable it for that site to read anything there.

 

But the reason I said "possibly" is because using an ad-blocker can also take away ad revenue from sites who depend on it for support and who might deserve the support. This site, LTT, for example. Here are how many ads or scripts ABP and Privacy Badger detect on LTT:

 

 

They can be disabled per site, so if there's a website someone wants to support, they can let ads and whatever else through.

 

 

 

I've added ProtonMail to the list of methods people can reduce tracking of them and harvesting of their data:

 

" - Using ProtonMail for you email. It has end-to-end encryption and your inbox is encrypted with a user encryption key so that ProtonMail can't view it, either. "

 

I haven't used ProtonMail yet myself, but I keep hearing it mentioned and looking into it, it sounds great.

 

 

[Delicieuxz]

3 hours ago, SupaKomputa said:

well einstein said the same thing...

He made it past the sharks with laser-eyes but fell to the sentinel guards. Tim Berners-Lee has studied their attack pattern and won't make the same mistake. Hopefully.

[Fnige]

10 hours ago, Drama Lama said:

he seems a little late

still using worldwideweb browser

[Mark Kaine]

11 hours ago, Delicieuxz said:

I haven't used ProtonMail yet myself, but I keep hearing it mentioned and looking into it, it sounds great.

my Google account uses proton mail lol... it's pretty weird I guess but it works... 

 

But big downside is if you ever have to recover your password - which I actually forget how that works...

then all your data up to the point of password reset is... actually, being deleted. 

which has to do with their encryption thing, but in the end is pretty dumb - or rather inconvenient. 

 

ps: initially I've chosen it because I thought it's the most secure option - but meanwhile I really like it because it's the *best looking* option. 

 

Spoiler

 

I wish everything on the internet would look this good instead of Google 'design language' that is really only designed to be most uncomfortable to use while obfuscating  Googles true intentions - which is to make the user click 'yes' without even thinking... (aka brainwashing) 

[DrMacintosh]

The internet is free, meaning you don’t have to pay to use Google Docs, YouTube, Reddit, etc. the downside to everything being free is that these services need to make money in less obvious ways. Aka ads and selling consumer data to advertisers. 
 

In order to move away from that, the only option is to switch to a “paid” internet and turn the web into something along the lines of  the horror that is cable packages. I don’t particularly want that.
 

Just my opinion though. As it stands, my favorite tech company also is the only player taking security and privacy seriously. I’m ok with that remaining a free market incentive and not the law. 

[Apple Trash]

This will never change until clueless users learn and change their habits. First step needs to be dropping the most egregious data harvesters like microsoft and google. Most of the users on this forum are only contributing to the problem because they prioritize the convenience of saving 10 seconds over their privacy which allows mega-corporations to abuse them like puppets.

[Drama Lama]

4 hours ago, DrMacintosh said:

The internet is free, meaning you don’t have to pay to use Google Docs, YouTube, Reddit, etc. the downside to everything being free is that these services need to make money in less obvious ways. Aka ads and selling consumer data to advertisers. 

My problems aren't Ads. I'm perfectly fine with them if they enable a service to be free but my Problem is tracking

[DrMacintosh]

26 minutes ago, Drama Lama said:

My problems aren't Ads. I'm perfectly fine with them if they enable a service to be free but my Problem is tracking

Targeted advertising is significantly more effective than simply putting any add in an ad space or pop-up on a website. They "track" you in the sense that they figure out what products you're in the market for and serve you ads to entice a purchase. The alternative to that is being served ads that probably have no relevance to you. You would also probably see a lot more of them because the blanket ads are not as effective and to makeup the lost revenue more ads are going to be served. 

 

With all that being said, hoping for legislation to pass or some (quite frankly preposterous) legal battle to solve the issues with the internet isn't going to happen. If you want to protect your own information, you need to use a privacy focused browser like Brave or Safari, an ad blocker, a VPN, and anonymous account services like sign in with apple or throw away emails. 

[Kisai]

21 hours ago, Delicieuxz said:

 

Some methods to reduce the amount of data being stolen from you and used for commercial and manipulative purposes include:

 

- Using DuckDuckGo for web searches. They don't store or collect any personal data.

 

- Using only an Enterprise or LTSC edition of Windows 10 as they afford for lowering the amount of data Microsoft takes from you beyond what Home and Pro allow. And Microsoft is tracking every mouse-click you make in Windows 10.

 

- Using ProtonMail for you email. It has end-to-end encryption and your inbox is encrypted with a user encryption key so that ProtonMail can't view it, either.

 

- Installing Electronic Frontier Foundation's browser plugin Privacy Badger [2] [3], which blocks a lot of tracking scripts.

 

- Possibly using an ad-blocker to reduce the amount of tracking and advertisement scripts websites can run when you browse their website.

 

- Making use of FireFox browser's built-in Facebook-tracking-blocking feature.

 

- Using your iPhones built-in option to block all tracking by apps.

 

- Setting your DNS resolver to Cloudflare's free 1.1.1.1 service. This prevents your ISP from recording your activity and searches and selling it. Cloudflare doesn't collect or sell any of your data and doesn't record any IPs. Cloudflare also has a mobile app that sets your mobile internet usage to its 1.1.1.1 service. Cloudflare say of their 1.1.1.1 service:

 

 

If you know of additional methods to secure your data and privacy, please share them.

This is missing the forest from the trees. Bandaids. The "web" is fundamentally broken because what was supposed to be a decentralized, non-landlording system, has been wrestled away.

 

- You should not have to pay for a domain name to exist

- You should not have to pay for hosting to exist, just run your own server

- You should not be prevented from running your own server by your ISP giving blocking ports or selling you modems that have NAT that prevent machines from getting real world IP addresses.

 

BitTorrent was the last innovation in terms of how content can be distributed and ISP's were quick to punish anyone running a torrent seed and likewise MPAA, RIAA, BSA, etc quickly accused anyone operating torrents were engaging in piracy (which wasn't wrong most of the time.)

 

What needs to happen, is the death of the "web". When large companies like google and facebook became AOL 2.0's and making everyone have to use their services if they want their content to be seen, this is a problem. Your content just gets lost in nonsense urls full of characters that nobody can remember, let alone type, and most people basically use google to find content on the internet, so google is literately making the rules to ensure they stay relevant.

 

So how do we fix this?

 

1) the domain name system needs to be dumped ASAP. A P2P search system does not yet exist.

2) content url's should be referenced their unique hash, not their name. So if i'm looking at an image, every system that references that image, references that hash, and keeps a copy of that image until that system no longer has a need for it. That way it doesn't just vanish because the originating server is offline. 

3) content blobs should not be identified. If two "pages" reference a specific hash, anyone searching or analyzing that page will not see that piece of content unless they themselves have downloaded it and either had a human or AI look at it.

 

It becomes the "lost dog" problem then. Anyone who has seen the dog, either has the dog, or a photo of the dog (eg the hash) and knows where it is. Anyone who doesn't, doesn't participate.

 

This of course is an oversimplication, and in many ways the tools already exist to do this (Tor, and BitTorrent) but they're not yet in widespread use, and are not being used the way it needs to be (eg all images and video being referenced by hash, and allowing anyone who visits the page to store a copy of the page and content with other devices on their network, or anyone else who visits the site at the same time.)

 

[Drama Lama]

20 minutes ago, Kisai said:

This of course is an oversimplication, and in many ways the tools already exist to do this (Tor,

but when you visit a lot of sites your speed gets intentionally throttled down by the server to annoy you and you have to solve a ton of captchas . almost all of that to annoy you and make you stop using tor so they can track you

[Kisai]

13 minutes ago, Drama Lama said:

but when you visit a lot of sites your speed gets intentionally throttled down by the server to annoy you and you have to solve a ton of captchas . almost all of that to annoy you and make you stop using tor so they can track you

Because again, Tor isn't being used correctly. Tor isn't supposed to be the presentation layer, but the transport layer.  Content you access is supposed to be cached the first time you access it, and the dynamic content websites do a lot to undermine this in the name of customization and personal information harvesting.

 

Cloudflare captcha's assume that those using proxies and tor itself are the bad guys, which is funny when they protect criminal websites.

[Delicieuxz]

I've added the DuckDuckGo CEO's explanation of their business model to the OP.

 

Quote

As we like to say, what you search on DuckDuckGo is private, even from us! We’re proud to have a business model for a web-based business that’s profitable without making your personal information the product. I’m happy to tell you all about how we make it work (and how other companies can, too).

 

Though first, if you’re unfamiliar with DuckDuckGo, we're the Internet privacy company for everyone who's had enough of hidden online tracking and wants to take back their privacy now. For over a decade, we've built products, created new technology, and worked with policymakers to make online privacy simple and accessible for all. Every day, millions of people rely on our free all-in-one solution (private search engine, tracker blocker, mobile browser) to stay private online.

 

Quote

The Big Myth
 

It’s actually a big myth that search engines need to track your personal search history to make money or deliver quality search results. Almost all of the money search engines make (including Google) is based on the keywords you type in, without knowing anything about you, including your search history or the seemingly endless amounts of additional data points they have collected about registered and non-registered users alike.
 

In fact, search advertisers buy search ads by bidding on keywords, not people. It makes intuitive sense, too. If you search for ‘car’, you are more likely to respond to a car ad than something you searched for last week.

 

I wish that DuckDuckGo would add a customized date-range search option. I often have to go back to Google's search to dial-in narrow search parameters. DuckDuckGo only does 1 week / 1 month / 1 year, etc from today's date. That isn't useful when wanting to look for something from years ago using search terms that have become, in search engines, more associated with something else in recent years.

[Bananasplit_00]

Is this even news? This is two years old already

[Delicieuxz]

31 minutes ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

Is this even news? This is two years old already

Tim Berners-Lee launched Inrupt in 2018. But the articles in the OP are dated February 2021, so they're new.

 

 

A Tim Berners-Lee article from 2018: “I Was Devastated”: Tim Berners-lee, The Man Who Created The World Wide Web, Has Some Regrets

Quote

"Berners-Lee has seen his creation debased by everything from fake news to mass surveillance. But he’s got a plan to fix it."

“We demonstrated that the Web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and failed in many places,” he told me. The increasing centralization of the Web, he says, has “ended up producing—with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform—a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human.”

 

[LogicalDrm]

*** Thread cleaned ***

 

Mainly because of off-topic. For the rest of the reasons, please refer to:

 

[robigan]

On 2/17/2021 at 11:17 AM, Delicieuxz said:

 Some methods to reduce the amount of data being stolen from you and used for commercial and manipulative purposes include:

 

- Using DuckDuckGo for web searches. They don't store or share any personal data.

 

- Using only an Enterprise or LTSC edition of Windows 10 as they afford for lowering the amount of data Microsoft takes from you beyond what Home and Pro allow. And Microsoft is tracking every mouse-click you make in Windows 10.

 

- Using ProtonMail for you email. It has end-to-end encryption and your inbox is encrypted with a user encryption key so that ProtonMail can't view it, either.

 

- Installing Electronic Frontier Foundation's browser plugin Privacy Badger [2] [3], which blocks a lot of tracking scripts.

 

- Possibly using an ad-blocker to reduce the amount of tracking and advertisement scripts websites can run when you browse their website.

 

- Making use of FireFox browser's built-in Facebook-tracking-blocking feature.

 

- Using your iPhones built-in option to block all tracking by apps.

 

- Setting your DNS resolver to Cloudflare's free 1.1.1.1 service. This prevents your ISP from recording your activity and searches and selling it. Cloudflare doesn't collect or sell any of your data and doesn't record any IPs. Cloudflare also has a mobile app that sets your mobile internet usage to its 1.1.1.1 service. Cloudflare say of their 1.1.1.1 service:

 

 

If you know of additional methods to secure your data and privacy, please share them.

Talking about websites that require you to unblock adblockers I use a separate extension called “Behind the Overlay” to remove the popup and works most of the time. On the other hand, as much as I would like to whitelist websites from my adblocker/privacy-extension I don’t. Because ik they don’t want my data, but the ads do, and that I cannot allow.

 

Edit: I forgot to mention this, and not many people can do this. But am interested in setting up my own email server/service. Altho I haven’t quite figured out the details yet and the viability