Data Ownership as a conversation changes when data resides primarily with people-governed institutions rather than corporations.
Back in 2009 Tim Berners-Lee drafted a web-specification for "Socially Aware Cloud Storage":
There is an architecture in which a few existing or Web protocols are gathered together with some glue to make a world wide system in which applications (desktop or web application) can work on top of a layer of commodity read-write storage.
Crucial design issues are that principals (users) and groups are identifies by URIs, and so are global in scope, and that elements of storage are access controlled using those global identifiers. The result is that storage becomes a commodity, independent of the application running on it.
Several of these ideas were going around in the late 2000s, shortly after the explosive growth of "web2" monoliths like Facebook.
Another spiritually similar idea being championed at the time came from the Opera browser folks who wanted to put "a web server in your browser".
While 'Opera Unite' never fully materialized, Tim's spec got significant traction some years down the road as one privacy crisis after another made the case for stronger web agency self-evident.
In 2015 Tim & co. secured some funding for the Solid Protocol.
Right now we have the worst of both worlds, in which people not only cannot control their data, but also can’t really use it, due to it being spread across a number of different silo-ed websites. Our goal is to develop a web architecture that gives users ownership over their data, including the freedom to switch to new applications in search of better features, pricing, and policies.”
... continue reading