The man who invented the internet, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has issued a grim warning to coincide with the 28th anniversary of the world wide web, saying trends like “fake news”, data harvesting and targeted political advertising threatened to destabilise his creation.
In an open letter published in the UK, Berners-Lee said that the three trends had to be tackled in order for the web to “fulfil its true potential.”
With internet users increasingly worried about privacy, the British computer scientist said that consumers had lost control of their personal data and widespread data collection by companies was undermining individual freedoms on the web.
According to Berners-Lee, while the trade-off between information and free services was well understood we were “missing a trick.”
“As our data is then held in proprietary silos, out of sight to us, we lose out on the benefits we could realise if we had direct control over this data, and chose when and with whom to share it,” he said.
“What’s more, we often do not have any way of feeding back to companies what data we’d rather not share — especially with third parties — the T&Cs are all or nothing.”
He’s also particularly critical of how easily false information can proliferate across the internet as search engines and social media sites become important channel through which people access news.
“These sites make more money when we click on the links they show us. And, they choose what to show us based on algorithms which learn from our personal data that they are constantly harvesting,” he said.
“The net result is that these sites show us content they think we’ll click on — meaning that misinformation, or ‘fake news’, which is surprising, shocking, or designed to appeal to our biases can spread like wildfire.”
Finally, Berners-Lee said that political advertising online, which had become increasingly sophisticated, needed greater transparency and understanding.
The Oxford-educated scientist, who submitted his original proposal for the web on March 12 1989, said that the public need to maintain the pressure against government overreach in surveillance laws and on gatekeepers such as Google and Facebook to ensure that they keep “fake news’’ in check.
Berners-Lee, who founded the industry group Web Foundation in 2009, added that the organisation had a five-year strategy in place to address the complex problems.
“We must work together with web companies to strike a balance that puts a fair level of data control back in the hands of people, including the development of new technologies like personal “data pods” if needed and exploring alternative revenue models like subscriptions and micropayments,” he said.
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