Tim Berners-Lee’s startup Inrupt launches Enterprise Solid Server to support the scalability of the Solid platform, which provides users a safe way to store personal data.
Inrupt, a provider of individual privacy solutions, has launched Enterprise Solid Server (ESS) to support its Solid platform. SolidOpens a new window is an acronym for social linked data. It is a platform which gives users greater data sharing privileges and a way to exercise control over who can (and can’t) access their data. ESS is the supporting backend infrastructure behind the Solid platform.
Solid has been around for a couple of years now and aims to ‘restore the power and agency of individuals on the web.’ It started as an open-source project at MITOpens a new window and was adopted by Tim Berners-Lee, who co-founded Inrupt based on this idea.
Three years later, the company is out with an enterprise version of the platform. Berners-Lee is also the founder of the World Wide WebOpens a new window .
With Solid, individuals can take control of the personal data of users which was previously by design in the hands of large corporations. Inrupt’s Solid platform is intended to bring about a shift in the way this data is stored. Its biggest advantage is that users can define the accessibility of data for third-party applications.
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On Solid, data resides in a digital locker of sorts, which Inrupt calls personal online data stores or PODS. All data generated from devices such as laptops, mobile phones, IoT devices, etc. is stored in a POD, the cloud-based data store. Only owners of the pod can grant access permissions to the data to third-party organizations for usage.
Security technologist at Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Bruce SchneierOpens a new window , saidOpens a new window , “Your data is no longer in a bazillion places on the Internet, controlled by you-have-no-idea-who. It’s yours. If you want your insurance company to have access to your fitness data, you grant it through your pod. If you want your friends to have access to your vacation photos, you grant it through your pod. If you want your thermostat to share data with your air conditioner, you give both of them access through your pod.â€
Solid has been adopted by the BBC, NatWest Bank, the UK’s National Health ServiceOpens a new window . Solid is also being leveraged by the government of Flanders, Belgium to create My Citizen ProfileOpens a new window , wherein every citizen will get their own POD for secure and private data storage.
The open-source platform is available on GitHubOpens a new window and can be leveraged by developers. Through Solid Server, organizations can manage PODS, develop applications, create operational workflows like monitoring and distributed logging, etc., at scale.
“The technologies we’re releasing today are a component of a much-needed course correction for the web,†said Berners-Lee, who also serves as the CTO at Inrupt. “It’s exciting to see organizations using Solid to improve the lives of everyday people – through better healthcare, more efficient government services and much more.â€
See Also: CCPA is Now CPRA — Here’s What’s Changed
The EconomistOpens a new window reported that around $1.4 trillion of the $1.9 trillion market value of Alphabet and Facebook combined is derived from mined user data, making such large corporations a control point of data. Schneier calls this ‘digital feudalism’.
The fact that startups now face more difficulty getting access to data than to capital speakers volumes of the reliance on data. Stricter, more stringent data privacy laws such as GDPR and the newly revamped CPRA facilitate the discussion around data privacy and push the development of privacy-centric technologies such as Inrupt’s Solid and a new internet protocol by The @ Company, a California-based startup, and more.
John BruceOpens a new window , Co-Founder and CEO at Inrupt told El PaÃsOpens a new window that despite being end user-centric, its adoption would start on the organizational side. He said, “We are not trying to help the average user yet. We first want to work with large organizations to help them with their users. It will take a while to build the system in a way that allows my mother to use it, for example.â€
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