Startup Tim Berners-Lee Launches Privacy-Focused Service to Secure Your Data

If you want to fight against control over your personal data from businesses, governments, hospitals, and other organizations, a startup called Inrupt could be an ally. The idea of ​​the company: to store your personal information separately and to share only what is necessary with the services only when you access them.

Inrupt calls these data collections “pods,” and they are accessed using the company’s open source data storage technology called Solid. You can store fitness data, for example, and then share it when your doctor’s Solid app requests access. You can also store your photos in a pod, pay a Solid app vendor to pick your best photos, and then pay another to print them.

A big name behind Inrupt is Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee, who is chief technology officer, co-founded the company with chief executive John Bruce. Inrupt has tested its service with the BBC, NatWest Bank and the National Health Service in the UK, as well as with the Flemish government in recent months. On Monday, the company made its Enterprise Solid Server, the infrastructure that supports the service, available to any interested customer.

“The technologies we are releasing today are part of an indispensable system course correction for the web“Berners-Lee said in a statement.” Ultimately, this new foundation of trust and cooperation will lead to entirely new business models that will also benefit users.

The widespread adoption of Interrupt – if successful – could mark a turning point for the internet, pushing away from apps and services that collect your data in order to serve personalized ads. The flip side is that many now free services, like web-based email, could end up charging customers a fee.

The launch of Interrupt comes as privacy becomes a bigger concern in the tech industry, whose reputation has suffered from high-profile scandals like Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica affair. Legislation, including the European General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act, could tip the scales in favor of privacy and business success.

The challenges of Solid and Inrupt include: attracting a critical mass of people, businesses and other organizations to adopt it; making it easy enough to use that its benefits outweigh the hassle; and make sure it doesn’t become a new channel for abuse and hacks. To help address the latter issue, Inrupt hired Bruce Schneier, a recognized IT security expert, as the Head of Security Architecture.