Web creator Tim Berners Lee on problems such as fake news, privacy and false political advertising

Web creator Sir Tim Berners Lee (Creative Commons license)

The World Wide Web turned 28 on Sunday and, for its birthday, it’s creator Sir Tim Berners Lee, wrote an open letter descriptively titled Three challenges for the web, according to its inventor.

The challenges, said Lee are:

  1. We’ve lost control of our personal data

  2. It’s too easy for misinformation to spread on the web

  3. Political advertising online needs transparency and understanding

The first has to do with the way our data is held in “proprietary silos,” suggesting it would be better “if we had direct control over this data.”  And points two and three have to do with fake news and deceptive political advertising, which became very apparent during the 2016 election in the U.S.

Read the letter