The guy who literally invented the World Wide Web is trying to reshape the business model behind the world’s most valuable commodity.
Driving the news: Seven million people in Belgium are now piloting a new digital wallet that lets users store and manage their personal data online. The ethos of the tool, developed by the internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee, is to give people full control of their information.
- The technology is designed to store everything from old social media posts to shopping history, but is mostly being used at the moment to secure and share sensitive data like medical records.
- It has already been piloted in Singapore and Japan, and is set to expand to Argentina, Spain, and Sweden.
Why it matters: User data has long been the economic engine that keeps the internet’s biggest companies rolling. Now, with AI models relying on troughs of data for training, it’s become even more valuable.
Bottom line: People have historically traded privacy for convenience when it comes to their data. This digital wallet will be a test of whether people are still willing to make that trade-off at a time when their data is more valuable than ever.—LA