How can we give users control and transparency over how their personal data is used on the Web?

By Laurens Debackere (Digitaal Vlaanderen)

Transcript

Good afternoon everyone.

Let me lead off with a quick question.

Do you trust the way that your personal data is being handled on the web today?

When was the last time you paused and thought about how your data is being processed and stored in online services?

That's the topic of this lightning talk, and that's the topic of the work I've been doing as a solution architect with Digital Flanders, the Flemish government in Belgium.

The problem that we are increasingly confronted with as a government, but also in business, is that we are processing and collecting and analyzing increasing amounts of data to conduct our business.

Yet, at the same time, our users, our customers are having the feeling like they've lost a sense of control over their personal data.

Data protection regulations like GDPR attempted to fix that and there have been many efforts since in other regions around the world to establish data protection.

But, regulators are basically catching up with what is happening in practice.

And increasingly, that manifests for end users as a take it or leave it decision regarding our personal data, we are confronted with dark patterns, vague wording, lengthy privacy policies.

It's not like we have a true bilateral sense of protection over our data.

As a user, we can't oversee how our data is being used, how it's being stored, and try to restore that balance.

And that's the work in Flanders we've been doing for the past couple of years, in the context of The Solid Project, which got started back in 2017.

It's the brainchild of Sir Tim, and has since seen a lot of other people put their shoulders behind this project with the aim of restoring end users' control over their data.

The Solid Project aims to develop a specification for decentralized personal data storage servers, which we also informally refer to as Pods.

And it sets out to define a new way of building applications and services on the web, where we separate apps from the data that they use.

In interim, it proposes a new model for data governance where we return user choice to the web where we have a more equitable balance of power between the end user who's sharing their data to get an online service, and a business or a government who needs that data to conduct their business.

And we do that by building upon existing web standards.

We're not inventing a new web, we're trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together of the web we already have.

This has resulted in a production release in Flanders for about 6 millions of our citizens who now have access to the Solid base personal data storage, and a couple of services offered by our Flemish government.

With a Solid community, we're trying to move towards a W3C working group, which Philippe has briefly touched upon.

The work that we have done so far has been under a W3C Community Group umbrella, which has been a more informal process where we had the time to dive into, on an ad hoc basis and very deeply, into several important topics surrounding Solid and the model that we try to establish for data governance.

But, a W3C working group is going to enable us to formalize that collaboration, the process, the scope, and set out a clear timeline for the different actors and stakeholders within the Solid community.

And of course, a Working Group and a Community Group should go hand in hand, where a Community Group can give us a breeding ground for fresh new ideas and bring together implementers from all around the community.

And the Working Group can focus on reaching consensus on established practices within Solid in order to formalize the specification.

Let me close off with a call to action to everyone here who might be interested in the topic of data protection, and what we're doing with Solid in order to revolutionize and restore the balance of power for end users.

You can find us and our proposed Working Group charter on GitHub.

It's been shared with the Advisory Committee last week.

And I also encourage you to check out some of the cool and open source implementations we have of the Solid protocol.

Thank you so much for listening.

(audience applauding)