Tuesday 26 July 2016

People Farming



The original World Wide Web, invented by Tim Berners-Lee back in 1989, was seen by many as a utopian design. A web that used open protocols and was decentralised meant anyone with a bit of knowledge could host a website. This decentralised web mainly ran on individual machines in bedrooms, offices or universities.

Fast forward through Google, Hotmail, Gmail and Facebook…

Today we have a very different web.  Despite the web being easier to use (you no longer require so much specialist knowledge), we see a web that has morphed from many decentralised individuals towards a web that clusters around a handful of centralised global corporates. Said companies spend fortunes on siphoning up as much of your data as possible and as a result hold a monopoly on your data. And let’s face it, this model tends to work; these companies are usually the ones that are actually selling the services we want to buy - Amazon, Uber, Airbnb.

But what does “People Farming” actually mean to us?
  • Companies like Google now want to mine our health records[1] to build up even more detailed profiles on us - how long before insurance is only available to the healthy elite?
  • PRISM, the US government surveillance programme revealed by Snowdon, allows the government bodies to walk into any service provider and demand they hand over all the data they hold on you.
  • And how safe is our data? Web servers, which are often in very poorly protected server farms, are honeypots to hackers…another day another password list for sale. 

These companies are able to offer you a “free” service, because the product they are selling is YOU. Your data is their profit. This seems to favour them more than it does us.

So what is being done to change this?
Solid[2] is a new web paradigm. In a project being worked on by Tim B-L, the idea is to separate our data from the servers and applications that process it. Effectively this should allow the user to take back control on their data. No longer will we be tied into LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook, simply because we cannot leave them as they hold all our data. Maidsafe[3] want to take this one step further - by removing these servers altogether. In Maidsafe’s network, files are (encrypted and) split across multiple devices, meaning no one device holds all your data - taking things back towards a distributed model rather than centralised individual nodes.

But today’s web is built on convenience. The fear is that decentalisation will take us back to a less convenient web. Maybe not; today we have better software, open standards, better interfaces and better applications all of which should be able to bring the convenience we are used to, whilst hiding this underlying decentralised platform from us. Maybe one day we can get back to that utopia - a web where individuals own and control their own data.

This post was inspired by a New Scientist article: “The web we want”, July 2016.

Some further reading:


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