Here is an exchange many of us can relate to either because of tax forms, or employment forms.
This is a text message exchange about a website that we both use to securely maintain records of employment, and payroll, and tax fillings. Employees are supposed to be able to access their own records, and exchanging and securing data like employment and taxes, is what I meant when I was discussing privacy and information security being an important future opportunity for the internet.
Imagine the data was either your data, or another entity, or another entity, and that your data property copies always existed on YOUR own server, instead of within walled garden belonging to a gatekeeper. Imagine if you could initiate permission and revocation, with the technology able to revoke access to your data when your contract expired? Inside the document, for example, your SS number visibility only existed within the context of the predefined contract to share it.
Tim Berners Lee is credited with creating the world wide web. By mapping 3rd party lists of name servers to file exchange protocols and architectural presentation standards, we see web pages like this, pulled from a computer not our own. He created a new privacy-focus project to roll out this internet architecture, calling it Solid, relating to the words social linked data.
Solid is a set of open specifications, built on existing open standards, that describes how to build applications so that users can conveniently switch between data storage providers and application providers and take the data generated along.
Here is an article about the project in TIME relating it to healthcare
Here is the main project page.
Here is an example Solid server you can run on your own server.
Here are some interesting videos about the Solid project and the need for internet privacy.
Here is a company building commercial applications for Solid
Solid is not the project that offered me a job, instead the project that I spoke with seems much earlier on in its commercial development cycle. It does seem actually farther ahead in the intellectual assumptions about the nature of what constitutes privacy however.