Web founder warns against website snooping

Surfers on the Internet are at increasing risk from governments and corporations tracking the sites they visit to build up a picture of their activities, the founder of the World Wide Web said on Friday.

Tim Berners-Lee, whose proposal for an information management system at the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN 20 years ago led eventually to the World Wide Web, said tracking website visits in this way could build an incredibly detailed profile of who people are and their habits.

"That form of snooping I think is really important to avoid," he told an anniversary celebration at CERN.

Technology now being developed will make it easier to decide who can see material one posts on the Web, and in what circumstances. For instance people may not want prospective employers to see an album of holiday photos, he said.

Berners-Lee, a British software engineer who is now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said innovation on the World Wide Web was speeding up.

"The Web is not all done, it’s just the tip of the iceberg," Berners-Lee said. "I am convinced that the new changes are going to rock the world even more."

One big change that is coming is "linked data," in which individual bits of data are machine-readable, not just the Web pages they appear on.

That would allow users to link readable data to similar data and manipulate it, for instance putting it in spreadsheets or plotting graphs. The sum of human knowledge would then grow exponentially in what Berners-Lee calls the Semantic Web.

Examples would be students accessing data from research institutes, or ordinary people getting hold of government data — paid for by taxes — to improve websites.

The system would allow investors to process the data contained in company press releases.

Source:  Reuters

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