Thursday, April 19, 2012

Tim Berners-Lee: Demand Your Data From Google and Facebook

Katz, Ian. "Tim Berners-Lee: Demand Your Data From Google and Facebook." The Guardian, April 18, 2012.

From the article: "Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the world wide web, has urged internet users to demand their personal data from online giants such as Google and Facebook to usher in a new era of highly personalised computer services "with tremendous potential to help humanity"…. In an interview with the Guardian, Berners-Lee said: "My computer has a great understanding of my state of fitness, of the things I'm eating, of the places I'm at. My phone understands from being in my pocket how much exercise I've been getting and how many stairs I've been walking up and so on."

Exploiting such data could provide hugely useful services to individuals, he said, but only if their computers had access to personal data held about them by web companies." ." Read more