| Notes |
History
Two decades after Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, he outlined the design issues of what later became the Solid project in drafts he wrote for the World Wide Web Consortium.[3][4] Berners-Lee became increasingly dismayed at seeing his invention being abused, such as when Russian hackers interfered with the 2016 US elections, when the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal became public, when Facebook in 2012 conducted psychological experiments on nearly 700,000 users in secret, and when Google and Amazon applied for patents on devices that listen for emotional changes in human voices.[5]
Berners-Lee felt that the Internet was in need of repair and conceived the Solid project as a first step to fix it, as a way to give individual users full control over usage of their data.[6] The Solid project is available to anyone to join and contribute, although Berners-Lee advises that people without coding skills should instead advocate publicly for changing the Internet.[7]
In 2015, MIT received a gift from Mastercard to support the development of Solid. Berners-Lee's research team collaborated with the Qatar Computing Research Institute and Oxford University on Solid.[8]
In 2018, Berners-Lee took a sabbatical from MIT to launch a commercial venture based on Solid, named Inrupt.[9][10] The company's mission is to "to provide commercial energy and an ecosystem to help protect the integrity and quality of the new web built on Solid."[11] |