How Tim Berners-Lee's Inrupt project plans to fix the web

Tim Berners-Lee wants to change the face of the internet he created. In Sept 2018, the father of the world wide web announced the launch of startup Inrupt, co-founded with cybersecurity entrepreneur John Bruce, which has as its mission “to restore rightful ownership of data back to every web user.” Since 2015, Berners-Lee has been working on a new web infrastructure called Solid, which rethinks how web apps store and share personal data. Inrupt aims to drive the development of the Solid platform and transform it from an innovative idea to a viable platform for businesses and consumers. The big idea behind Solid is that, instead of a company storing all your personal data on their servers, you would keep it on your own personal data “pod”, located on a Solid server. You could run your own server or host it with a provider, much like a personal website. You could then give individual apps permission to read and write to your pod. When you want to stop using an app, you just revoke its access. The data remains on your pod, and businesses making apps never have to worry about storing it, deleting it, or making it easily exportable.