2020-11-13
This is huge! I somehow had totally missed that Solid was this far along, and that Bruce was working on it. I have a good friend who worked at a startup, Singly, which, though now-defunct, was aimed at storing data in a way not so different than Solid. Here's how TechCrunch wrote of it in 2012:
The company began its life as The Locker Project, which would capture data from a user’s online activities (e.g. tweets, photos, checkins, etc.) and archive those items in a storage locker of sorts. Those efforts continue as an open source project, but Singly as it stands today is the commercial result of the problems solved while building The Locker Project. With the commercial launch, the company will offer the “app fabric” for $99/month for up to 1 million users, handling authentication, friend-finding, social sharing, and the like. Meanwhile, pricing is available upon demand for those with more complex data needs (aka the “data fabric,” as they call it), including syncing, storage, filtering, de-duping, intelligent indexing and more.
And here's an excerpt from the Inrupt press release about Solid:
The idea behind Solid is both simple and extraordinarily powerful. Your data lives in a pod that is controlled by you. Data generated by your things — your computer, your phone, your IoT whatever — is written to your pod. You authorize granular access to that pod to whoever you want for whatever reason you want. Your data is no longer in a bazillion places on the Internet, controlled by you-have-no-idea-who. It’s yours. If you want your insurance company to have access to your fitness data, you grant it through your pod. If you want your friends to have access to your vacation photos, you grant it through your pod. If you want your thermostat to share data with your air conditioner, you give both of them access through your pod.
Pretty cool development to the issue of data privacy...I hope this takes off!