Three challenges for the web, according to its inventor
Three challenges for the web, according to its inventor
The world wide web has been around for 28 years now. Web inventor Sir Tim
Berners-Lee writes
about the challenges facing the modern web, including the loss of control of
our personal data, the spread of misinformation, and the lack of
transparency in political advertising. "Political advertising online
has rapidly
become a sophisticated industry. The fact that most people get their
information from just a few platforms and the increasing sophistication of
algorithms drawing upon rich pools of personal data, means that political
campaigns are now building individual adverts targeted directly at
users. One
source suggests that in the 2016 US election, as many as 50,000
variations of adverts were being served every single day on Facebook, a
near-impossible situation to monitor. And there are suggestions that some
political adverts – in the US and around the world – are being used in
unethical ways – to point voters to fake news sites, for instance, or to keep
others away from the polls. Targeted advertising allows a campaign to
say completely different, possibly conflicting things to different
groups. Is that democratic?
"