Tim Berners-Lee's Inrupt, which helps people control their data, has raised ~$20M to date and is piloting projects with UK's National Health Service and others
Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data. He has technology and a start-up pursuing that goal. Tweets: @gilestremlett , @tprstly , @snazzyazzy , @donelson52 , @mikemongo , and @rschon Tweets: Giles Tremlett / @gilestremlett : Taking back control? He Created the Web. Now He's Out to Remake the Digital World. https://www.nytimes.com/... Theo Priestley / @tprstly : He's still banging this drum on deaf ears. Nobody cares. Nobody wants this hassle. Get over it Tim. https://www.nytimes.com/... Azmina / @snazzyazzy : Others became internet billionaires, while Mr. Berners-Lee became the steward of the technical norms intended to help the web flourish as an egalitarian tool of connection and information sharing. https://www.nytimes.com/... William Donelson / @donelson52 : “Companies could gain access to a person's data, with permission, through a secure link for a specific task like processing a loan application or delivering a personalized ad. They could link to and use personal information selectively, but not store it.” https://www.nytimes.com/... Mike Mongo / @mikemongo : Wait the inventor of the World Wide Web is only 65? This fills me with hope! https://twitter.com/... Roger C. Schonfeld / @rschon : “Too much power and too much personal data, he says, reside with the tech giants...The idea is that each person could control his or her own data — websites visited, credit card purchases, workout routines, music streamed — in an individual data safe” https://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Berners-Lee's data-control push has been running since the 2018 unveiling of Solid and Inrupt, an open-source protocol for storing personal data in user-controlled pods. This 2021 profile marks the transition from manifesto to deployments: roughly $20M raised and live pilots with the UK's National Health Service, the first large public-sector test of the idea.
The stakes are adoption, not invention. Skeptics in the coverage argue consumers won't accept the hassle of managing their own data, and a later FT review of Berners-Lee's memoir reports Inrupt still struggling to scale — while a 2024 Belgium digital wallet trial for 7M citizens shows the public sector, not consumers, becoming the beachhead.
First-order effects
- NHS pilot participants get Solid-based control over their health data — the first time the protocol handles sensitive records at national-health-system scale rather than demo apps.
- Inrupt converts its ~$20M of funding into public-sector reference deployments, shifting its pitch from developer idealism to government procurement.
Second-order effects
- If the NHS and Belgium pilots hold, other national health and social-services agencies become Inrupt's natural buyers, making government integration the company's de facto go-to-market as consumer uptake lags.
- Platform incumbents whose business models depend on aggregating personal data face a counter-model in which citizens grant or revoke access per service — a competitive threat that stays theoretical until pod-based wallets reach scale.
Third-order effects
- If government-run data wallets prove durable, personal-data control migrates from platform terms of service to citizen-held infrastructure, with states as the trusted intermediaries — an outcome Berners-Lee's own later commentary on power concentration and data exploitation frames as the web's central unresolved question.
- The unresolved risk is commercial: the reported scaling struggles suggest decentralized data may need sustained public funding to survive, raising the question of whether Solid becomes public infrastructure or a well-intentioned footnote.
The trend: Personal-data portability is moving from open-source idealism to government-run pilots, with public agencies — not consumers — as the early adopters deciding whether Solid-style data control scales.