10
ISSUES: Privacy
Chapter 1: What is privacy?
Sir Tim Berners-Lee slams internet’s
evolution and risks it poses to privacy
Sir Tim is frustrated with pernicious ads and privacy violations
By Josie Cox
S
ir Tim Berners-Lee, the man
credited with inventing the
World Wide Web, has given
a series of interviews in which he
has criticised how the Internet
has developed, condemned how
advertising has evolved and warned
of the risks that global connectivity
poses to users’ privacy.
In an interview with
The Guardian
,
Sir Tim said that the Trump
administration’s decision to allow
internet service providers to sign away
their customers’ privacy and sell users’
browsing habits is “disgusting” and
“appalling”.
The problemwith the Internet, he said,
is that it can be “ridiculously revealing”.
“You have the right to go to a doctor
in privacy where it’s just between you
and the doctor. And similarly, you have
to be able to go to the Web.”
He also launched criticism at the way
in which the Internet is used for so-
called “clickbait” journalism.
“Clickbait, which is written in such
a seductive way that it’s almost
impossible not to click on it, along with
pop-up advertising, are both pushing
people very, very hard so that they’re
liable to lash back and just deliberately
pay for anything that won’t have ads,
basically,” he said.
In a separate interview, he told
Wired
UK that online privacy should be a
human right but is being “trampled
on”.
“You can’t mess with human rights like
that without massive unexpected and
very disastrous consequences,” he was
quoted as saying.
Speaking to
MIT Technology Review
,
Sir Tim said that the Internet’s “social
networks should be thinking about
how they can tweak their systems to
make truth more likely to propagate,
and fake news likely to fade out”.
Sir Tim, a Professor at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and the
University of Oxford, was this
week awarded the Association for
Computing Machinery’s Turing Award,
which is often referred to as the Nobel
Prize of Computing and carries prize
money of $1 million.
Would you be willing to wear a surveillance device to record every aspect of your life
24 hours a day for one full year for scienti c research (conducted by a university)?
YouGov, Jan 2017
Yes, but only if paid to do so
Yes, even without being paid
No
Not sure
32%
48%
16%
4%
He is credited with creating the World
Wide Web in 1989 while working at
CERN, the European Organization for
Nuclear Research, and ACM said that it
was this week honouring him because
of the Internet’s “contributionof lasting
and major technical importance to
the computing community, due to its
simplicity, elegance and extensibility”.
“It is hard to imagine the world before
Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s invention,” said
ACM President Vicki Hanson. “In many
ways, the colossal impact of the World
Wide Web is obvious. Many people,
however, may not fully appreciate the
underlying technical contributions
that make the Web possible.”
5 April 2017
Ö
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The above information is reprinted
with kind permission from
The
Independent
. Please visit www.
independent.co.uk for further
information.
© independent.co.uk 2017
