Inrupt brings a privacy service to secure users’ data

Inrupt is a startup that comes with a solutions for every user who wants to be in control of their personal data in front of any organization. According to the company, users can stop hospitals, companies and even governments from taking advantage of their data.

Inrupt: Store your data separately

The new idea the company comes with is that users can store their personal information separately and decide to share only the necessary data with services. Moreover, any user can do this only when she/he’s accessing those services.

Solid is the new open data storage technology that the company comes with. It offers users the opportunity to share just the necessary data, only when they access the services.

Inrupt is talking about the data collections as “pods”. Service providers can only access them using the startup’s open source data storage technology.

No matter if users store data about their subscriptions to a magazine or images that they want to print. They can choose what data and to whom they want to send.

The inventor of the “www” is behind the technology

The company that came with the technology belongs to the inventor of the world wide web – Tim Berners-Lee. He is the chief technology officer and co-founded the company with John Bruce.

Huge players on the market already tested the technology: BBC, the National Health Service in he UK, the NatWest Bank and the Flanders government.

Now, the company made available the infrastructure that supports its service, to any interested customer.

According to Berners-Lee: “The technologies we’re releasing today are a component of a much-needed course correction for the web” Berners-Lee said in a statement.

He believes that the new technology should lead both to new business models and important benefits for users.

If the market is going to widely adopt the new technology, it would mean the end of an era when apps and services harvest data and then serve personalized ads.

Additional safety measures

Still, there is one important thing: free things will not be free, anymore. Many services might end up charging customers for what they offer.

So, it’s a matter of choice: paying with personal data or paying with real money and protecting data.

Thus, it could be successful if they manage to attract a critical mass of users and organizations.

In order to prevent the new solution from becoming a new abusive channel, the company hired Bruce Schneier. He is a renowned cryptographer, security technologist and privacy specialist, called a “security guru” by The Economist.