The Belgian region of Flanders is providing personal data "pods" to 7 million citizens in a test of World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee's vision to make data privacy purely user-controlled.
Five Belgian hospitals have started storing patient visit information in the datasets, developed by startup Interrupt of Berners-Lee over the past five years.
The system aims to help comply with European privacy regulations by giving citizens control over their personal information, from medical records to social media posts.
The basic idea behind this approach is that users control their data in online storage infrastructures called Personal Online Data Stores or Pods for short.
The initiative certainly faces the current Internet landscape dominated by big tech companies like Google and Meta, which store user data on their servers.
Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989, advocates returning data control to users through decentralized systems rather than leaving it vulnerable to collection by technology platforms and governments.
