Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is out to kill the existing internet world order.

On Saturday, he unveiled his latest project: an attempt to free your personal data from data-harvesting giants such as Google and Facebook, and bring it back into your own hands.

"There is a wave of concern," he wrote in a blog post. "People want to have a web they can trust."

His new project, Solid, seeks to decentralize the web. You'd store your data in a "digital pod" that acts like a private website. Your pod can feed into your favorite apps and services, but the data itself is under your control.

"It gives every user a choice about where data is stored, which specific people and groups can access select elements and which apps you use," Berners-Lee said. "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."

Berners-Lee announced the project as the internet industry has come under increased scrutiny for harvesting people's private information and using it to sell ads. These practices have been abused time and time again by third-party companies to read your emails and vacuum up your personal data without your knowledge.

Berners-Lee's new project is trying to disrupt the current internet business model, which he claims can tempt companies to maximize profits over the public good. His idea is to let you store your data on a computer in your house, your office, or with an online third-party provider of your choice. Developers will then build their apps over the Solid platform to get permission to access your data. But presumably, the apps themselves will never directly store any of your personal information.

Is this all too good to be true? Maybe. To fund this new eco-system, consumers will have to pay for it, Berners-Lee said. But he's convinced at least some people will buy into his idea. "People want apps that help them do what they want and need to do—without spying on them," he said. "People will pay for this kind of quality and assurance."

To usher the new project along, Berners-Lee is taking a sabbatical from MIT, where he works as a professor, and reducing his day-to-day duties at the World Wide Web Consortium. He'll be guiding Solid's development through a startup he founded called Inrupt, which is seeking to bring more developers on board.

Still, the Solid platform is an early work in progress. "The end-user experience isn't designed for regular everyday users just yet," according to Ruben Verbough, a developer at the startup. "Our hope and plan has been to engage developers, designers, and technology enthusiasts to help us shape what the experience will be." Interested developers can learn more here.