Responsible and Empowering Technology as a Pillar of Modern Peace
Chairman Yeom, Secretary-General Kim, Chairman Koo and Members of the Peace Prize Selection Committee, ladies, gentlemen, and assembled guests. I would like to express my sincere, and honoured thanks to the Seoul Peace Prize Cultural Foundation for this highest honour, I am truly humbled. My last trip to the Republic of Korea was eight years ago, and it is a pleasure to be welcomed back so warmly to this exciting country.
From its proud history to its tremendous growth in the past fifty years as an economic, cultural, and industrial success, South Korea is a world leader in technological development. South Korea topped the Bloomberg Global Innovation Index in 2021 and is a leader in many areas including Smart Cities, drones, and scientific research. It also has the fastest average internet connection in the world, and 98% of the Korean population is online.
It is a great honour to receive the Seoul Peace Prize, and a pleasure to be speaking with you today about what I believe to be one of the next frontiers in peace: data sovereignty. In a world where we face instability, inequality, and worry about the misuse of technology, data sovereignty is the power to control your own data, to protect it from abuse and to use it constructively for your own purposes and personal empowerment.
While I am most often recognised for the invention of the Web in 1989, I am delighted to receive an award for my work on data sovereignty, including the creation of the Solid Protocol. Solid is the third layer of Web protocols and builds on the Web that I invented over thirty years ago. I would like to speak to you about the aims of Solid: to make the Web better for all citizens around the world; to ensure that data privacy is maintained; and to make certain that individual liberties are protected. But first I would like to examine our responsibility around data.
I firmly believe that we have a responsibility to create a safer, fairer, and healthier digital world. A world that preserves and promotes an open, trust-based landscape for innovation and maintains civil liberties, democracy, and peace. We need to build a society where people can work together towards peace using technology.
The concept and reality of peace is important to address now more than ever. Our global community has felt shocks in recent years, with mounting geopolitical instability, war, a global pandemic, market uncertainty, fragmentation of the global economy, and the climate crisis. The Global Peace Index, developed by the Institute for Economics and Peace, reports that the average level of global peacefulness dropped again this past year, continuing a sad and long-standing trend of steady decline in eleven of the past fourteen years. I believe that it is our constant collective pursuit of peace and higher values that defines the human spirit of resilience, and our shared purpose to leave the world a better place than the one we inherited.
The American author E.B. White said...
“Most people think of peace as a state of Nothing Bad Happening, or Nothing Much Happening.... Yet if peace is to overtake us and make us the gift of serenity and well-being, it will have to be the state of Something Good Happening.”
Peace is more than the absence of war. The Norwegian pioneer of peace research, Johan Galtung, defined negative peace as a world without conflict or violence. He also defined positive peace as “more lasting peace, built on sustainable investments in economic development and institutions as well as the societal attitudes that foster peace.”As we evaluate the impact of these issues on peace, the way we use technology can and must help us. The Seoul Peace Prize Foundation Chairman Jae-ho Yeom has said the promotion of data sovereignty contributes towards“ the pursuit of positive peace by removing all structural restrictions that oppress peace including.... the structural control of personal information.”While many believe it to be more difficult to preserve and promote peace in such uncertain times, I believe that challenging circumstances invite us to act, and engineer solutions. When fighting for positive peace on the Web, it is not just about spotting and fighting intentional or unintentional bad things, it is about building good, robust, and respectful things.
History tells us that new inventions ask important questions of our society and change the nature and practice of peace. The Web impacted our contemporary understanding of peace by changing the way we communicate and collaborate with one another. So, what were some of those changes?
I have noted before, that the Web is humanity connected by technology. The Web aided cross-border and cross-cultural communication and connected billions of people around the world. However, communication can have positive and negative consequences. Accurate, fact-based, and respectful communication helps our understanding of each other, but misinformation can be hijacked to sow the seeds of division when used by people who wish to promote unrest. We see misinformation and disinformation on the rise online. When we talk about misinformation, we mean perhaps a conspiracy theory, or other incorrect and misleading information that grows by itself within an echo chamber. Disinformation, however, is the deliberate injection of false information to manipulate people as individuals or as communities. The most grievous form of disinformation, when a leader keeps their own people in the dark about the real state of the world, is a common prerequisite to war. The responsibility to fight both misinformation and disinformation online is a responsibility that we all must take seriously to preserve the compassionate, comprehensive, and enriching function of communication in an increasingly digitised world.
The Web was built on the Internet. The Internet and the Web are two different technologies. The Internet was invented twenty years before in 1969, and was designed as an open, permissionless platform. In turn, the Web is also an open, permissionless platform that has facilitated people to build tools designed to engage with democratic processes. It enables intergovernmental institutions, -- for example, the United Nations -- political groups, and citizens to post open data sets publicly, increasing transparency and accountability, and governments to post online information, petitions, and polls for citizens. Both aspects are key components of a peaceful, civil society as well as making countries more efficient, raising productivity, and bringing about economic growth.
The Web has also increased the ability of people to organise and mobilise against injustices in society, and the pace at which protests can be assembled. Other Web based projects have enabled better emergency response in moments of crisis. Open Street Map is like Google Maps except free and open source and made by people (including me). An example of its usefulness was when an earthquake struck Haiti in 2010. Within two days, there was a global volunteer push to update the area around Port au Prince, creating high-resolution, post-event satellite imagery of the impact zone. This feat would forever change crisis mapping and since then lots of humanitarian agencies have relied on Open Street Maps in the field.
The Web has been an incredible force for good. However today, if you ask people what they think about the Web, they will likely have many concerns. These might include privacy, data rights, security, tracking, free speech and hate speech, political advertising, and much more. For me there is more than one thing that keeps me up at night about the Web. Here are just a few - censorship, accountability, and privacy.
Of the various attacks on the Web, perhaps the most direct is censorship and blocking. Free speech and exercise of democracy in a peaceful society is important, but it is threatened in many countries. There are governments around the world who are blocking opposition parties’content online. These governments are filtering out ideas that are seen to be counter to their regime. Some just shut down the access of their citizens to the Web in times of crisis. This obviously is a dramatic attack on the Web and its role in a peaceful society.
Information availability and access on the Web is key to the Web’s purpose. When people have access to information from varied sources and varied perspectives, they can share information, gain opportunities, and collaborate across geographical boundaries for science, and democracy. It is this informational power that provides a strong argument as to why individual data sovereignty is so important. We see that with controlled and restricted access to information, citizens are not able to make informed decisions, or participate fully in democracy and can be subject to manipulation and misinformation. It is a measure of the strength of a government, the extent to which they allow their citizens understand the real state of the world.
A more complex problem with the Web is the way in which it often lacks accountable systems. When an individual gives access to their own data, it is often impossible to retain control over that data and to prevent it being used for unintended purposes -- or ultimately turn off access to that data after a period. We rely on companies and governments to use the data they have access to for specific purposes. purposes that have been granted express consent by individuals. We need these groups, governments, or corporations, to be truly accountable for what, how, and why they use our data. That is why accountability mechanisms are crucial.
Another key issue is the wave of tracking and spying on the Web. Misuse of data from citizen’s browsing information can be used to profile them and potentially manipulate them into voting against their best interests.
Privacy is a fundamental human right. In democratic societies, law enforcement agencies often demand the ability to monitor citizens more and more in online spaces. There is a balance . and a tension . between monitoring by law enforcement and personal privacy. Citizens should have their civil liberties protected, be able to share information and limit the collection and control of their personal communications and data. The need for privacy and anonymity is especially clear in situations and places where vulnerable people, for example groups like LGBTQ+ people, activists, and journalists and their sources, might be under threat and need protection.
A pivotal example that brought awareness of these online issues was the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In 2014, a company called Cambridge Analytica collected personal information from 50 million Facebook users. The data collection was designated to be only used for scientific research. However, in fact, the information was used without permission to create psychological profiles about many Facebook users to exploit their behaviours and target them with personalised political advertisements. Cambridge Analytica was hired by the 2016 Trump campaign and other political campaigns in the US and the UK, including the UK “Leave”Campaign which led to Brexit, Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union. The uncovering of this scandal opened a window, for many people for the first time, to the complicated world of data being used and misused in ways never considered. That Cambridge Analytica scandal, that impacted sixty-eight countries, brought the power of data into society’s collective consciousness.
So, we see that many problems can be precipitated from the use and misuse of the Web and technology. The protections of users and their personal data are crucial to the pursuit of positive peace, and a necessary pillar in the fair, democratic and moral engagement with the digital world.
We see in this necessary protection of people online underscored in the recent September 2022 UN Report on Right to Privacy in a Digital Age. The report focuses on the widespread abuse of intrusive hacking tools, the important role of robust encryption to guarantee the right to privacy among other rights and the widespread monitoring of public spaces.
The roles of privacy and human rights online ask us new questions and require new solutions in a digital age. It is in pursuit of building a world more legitimate and equitable, that I created the Solid Protocol. I believe it is time we make that connection between the rights we afford people offline, and the rights we afford them online. Guaranteeing these human rights online is a key pillar of a peaceful and just society.
Let us go one step further. Data sovereignty means you are not only protected online but that you are empowered. The same way Open Data is powerful, so is the data of our private interactions as we work with others on the Web to solve the world’s problems. Our own data enables us to be healthier, form human connections, and aids our ability to organise, campaign and practice the proliferation of peace. Open Data encourages accountability, transparency, and economic productivity. The ability to share our own personal data with whomever we wish creates new opportunities for collaboration, group creativity, and tools for democracy. That is empowerment in action.
The next frontier in the promotion of peace that I am devoting my energy to is Solid. We have been developing the technology necessary to support this for the last 10 years. This technology has now evolved to become a movement. The Solid Protocol adds to the existing Web to give users complete control of their data. It decouples data from applications. From the protocol point of view, Solid adds a third layer to the existing Web. The effect of these new protocols will turn the existing Web right way up again, putting the user back on top. It overturns a few assumptions too.
We added a global identity system, so that instead of having to sign into things with Google or Facebook or Twitter, which is potentially harmful as these sites can then track your data and monitor your use across the Web, you can sign in with any Solid provider and you will not be tracked. We added universal sharing control so you can share anything with anyone. With a Solid ID, you get storage on the Web. a solid “pod”, a personal cloud storage if you like, imagine a ubiquitous USB key.
Earlier, I spoke about the difference between negative, and positive peace. One is preventing the bad, the other is promoting the good. This positive and negative framework also extends to individual data sovereignty.
We have talked about preventing the negative aspects of data, such as misuse or manipulation, the foundational positive aspect of data sovereignty is data privacy, security, and trust. This data hygiene fulfils the need to reduce or erase the something bad happening in our pursuit of positive peace. Data sovereignty is not just about privacy or about data hygiene. It is also about ensuring that something good happens which is your personal empowerment.
Solid enables the pursuit of positive peace by removing the bad by ensuring hygiene and promotes the good by actively by returning control to people. From a practical and architectural perspective, when you use a Solid app, instead of a site storing your data on its own website, Solid stores the data directly in your pod. This is how you maintain control and access over your data. Solid aims to create not only a safe world but one in which you are empowered to interact with others online and share anything you wish with anyone, without worrying about which social network they use or how your information might be stolen, sold, or misused.
I believe when citizens are empowered with sovereign control over their own data, we are creating an environment more conducive to peace. When people have control over what they do on the Web and align those rights with the rights we have offline, we enable fully empowered individuals primed to participate in global citizenship. This lays the foundations for better democratic processes, more scientific innovation, honest communication, creativity, and collaboration.
I hope that the work I have started with Solid, and this movement that is gaining pace every day, is one of the good things happening. The Solid community now includes governments, businesses and individuals and we are excited about the power the collective empowerment of individual people, and how this will positively impact our lives on- and off-line. I invite you to become part of this work, to ensure that the pursuit of peace is a responsibility we all share. We need to build a society where people can work together towards using technology.
We envision a future of respectful, intellectual debates online. We are optimistic for a renaissance in international collaboration to solve some of humanities greatest problems and share the dividends of those solutions to all corners of the Earth.
We plan for a future where people are afforded the rights all humans deserve while online, and for their privacy to be respected, and to have complete control of what the world sees about them, based on their own decisions on what to share.
Peace, in its simplest form, is ultimately about our relationships with each other. And the Web has changed how we relate to each over the past thirty years ago. With Solid, and individual data sovereignty, we can evolve those relationships to be stronger, more respectful, and more empowering.
It is within our grasp to create the online world we want.
Let us make it happen together.
Thank you.
November 14, 2022
Tim Berners-Lee
Director of the World Wide Web consortium
