World Wide Web inventor wants to bring his digital data system to India

World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee said India could benefit from adopting SoLiD, a digital data platform designed to give users greater control over how their personal data is shared

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the celebrated computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web, says he would like to see India introduce SoLiD, a digital platform he has developed to allow users take control of their own data. 

Separately, he said he had had a telephone conversation with Pramod Varma, often described as an architect of the Aadhaar unique identity system, about the architecture of UPI, the digital payment interface. The UK does not have a comparable system.  

Business Standard sent Varma queries on his email and mobile phone seeking details of the conversation held on Saturday. The queries were sent out of office hours on Sunday. 

Berners-Lee, who is at the Jaipur Literary Festival to promote his recently published memoir, This Is For Everyone, said SoLiD, which stands for Social Linked Data protocol, would allow ordinary users to decide if and with whom they want to share their data.  

“It would be great if we had a project to do SoLiD (with India),” he told Business Standard in an interview on Saturday.  

“India is advanced in that everybody has an ID. But behind that (digital) ID (Aadhaar), you don't have a place where you can share information between each other — nothing. If you have a place where you shared information between each other, then there are all sorts of collaborative apps which you could use.”  

Berners-Lee developed SoLiD along with dedicated researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, as part of a wider campaign to make the web safe and accessible to all, not just large corporations. Now driven by his company Inrupt, the protocol permits user to take control of all the data in their lives and put that data together to achieve new results. “It returns the web to its roots, giving creators new collaborative tools, while passing power back to users,” said Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web in 1989, in his book.   

In the interview with Business Standard, he said: “For example, you could secure your medical data. And you share it with whoever you want. You could share it with your doctors, but also you could share it with a researcher who is trying to find a cure for cancer. They could put out a course, and we need medical data from these sorts of people. Or if you take a drug, then you could be part of a clinical trial — because you've got your data in the data pod or data wallet.” 

The computer scientist cited the principle of ‘minimum data sharing’ to buttress his point. “If you don’t want to share (data) with something, you should be able to, as a principle of the minimum: The minimum amount of information (a person is comfortable sharing). 

SoLiD puts user data in data-pods, which can be stored on mobile phones, computers or on the cloud. 

Teams of researchers are working on developing and refining the platform using what is called ‘multi-party computation.’

Awards won by the much-decorated British scientist include the 2016 Turing prize — called the technology Nobel — “for inventing the World Wide Web, the first Web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale.” However, unlike developers of other digital technologies, Berners-Lee refused to commercialise the World Wide Web, insisting it remain non-proprietary and free for all users.