Sir Tim Berners Lee is building a ‘new internet’ where you’re in control of your own data The founder of the world wide web is creating a new way to store your data online

Sir Tim Berners Lee is building a new version of the world wide web, designed to take power away from tech corporations including Facebook and Google and restore it to the individual.

The founder of the world wide web has been developing web platform Solid for several years with colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) through new company inrupt, guided by the principle of “personal empowerment through data.”

The project gives users the choice to decide where their data, including photos, address book, message history, music library and documents, is stored and the means access them easily in one place, instead of through various apps and systems like WhatsApp, Google Drive, Spotify etc.

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The current web has “evolved into an engine of inequity and division; swayed by powerful forces who use it for their own agendas,” Sir Tim wrote in a blog post.

“Solid changes the current model where users have to hand over personal data to digital giants in exchange for perceived value. As we’ve all discovered, this hasn’t been in our best interests. Solid is how we evolve the web in order to restore balance — by giving every one of us complete control over data, personal or not, in a revolutionary way.”

Solid is a platform build using the existing web, and appears on a computer like a standard web page, according to the Fast Company, the first publication to see the project.

All data added to Solid is controlled within a Solid pod, which is assigned to every user who is free to move around and delete information as they please. Data shared with companies like Facebook and Google is currently kept in silios and are controlled by the firms, not the user.

Users can sign up for an account on the Solid site

Sir Tim is taking a sabbatical from MIT and is planning to seek venture funding for the project in the autumn.

“We are not talking to Facebook and Google about whether or not to introduce a complete change where all their business models are completely upended overnight,” he told the Fast Company. “We are not asking their permission.”

Sir Tim has spoken disparagingly of the direction the web is heading in over the past few months, in the wake of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica data scandal and the row over net neutrality in the US.

The academic said he imagined Mark Zuckerberg was “devastated that his creation has been abused and misused” following the revelation the company had inadvertently allowed third-parties to harvest user data, adding: “Some days I have the same feeling, just saying.”

He has also spoken out against the US communications regulator’s plans to repeal rules forbidding internet service providers from favouring certain services over others, saying that losing net neutrality (a founding principle of the world wide web) is losing “the internet as we know it”.