Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has called on web users to download and use their data from social networks, to make the information work for them rather than the likes of Facebook.
According to Berners-Lee, the social networks are capitalising on data sets that could be re-employed as useful resources for consumers, helping to improve diet and health, for example.
“My computer has a great understanding of my state of fitness, of the things I’m eating, of the places I’m at. My phone understands from being in my pocket how much exercise I’ve been getting and how many stairs I’ve been walking up and so on,” the British-born web innovator said in an interview with The Guardian.
One of the issues of social networking silos is that they have the data and I don’t
He called on Facebook and Twitter to be more open with the data so that it could be used by individuals for data mining and building apps that make the data work harder, and said people failed to understand the value of the data held about them online. “One of the issues of social networking silos is that they have the data and I don’t,” he said.
“There are no programmes that I can run on my computer which allow me to use all the data in each of the social networking systems that I use plus all the data in my calendar plus in my running map site, plus the data in my little fitness gadget and so on to really provide an excellent support to me.”
Facebook did recently update a download tool that gave users access to 22 different categories of data, but it came under fire from a European pressure group for not going far enough, with Europe vs Facebook calling for the company to make 84 datasets available under European law.
Disclaimer: Some pages on this site may include an affiliate link. This does not effect our editorial in any way.
