To understand how we got here, it’s important to look back. The World Wide Web of the 1990s was a place where we took our books, our research and our lives online for easy retrieval: encyclopedias, medical records, and entire libraries. Slowly, Internet browsers improved, and we developed from the “Read Web” to the “Read-Write Web,” also known as Web 2.0.
Posting, tweeting, liking, commenting, and clapping all joined the lexicon of internet interaction. Everyday users became creators of trillions of rows of data, by simply telling a company, like Facebook, what they “liked”. And quietly—almost imperceptibly—as Web 2.0 grew users lost control of their digital identity which is now scattered all over the Internet. Even worse, tech giants are now tracking users’ behaviour on and offline, without active consent or knowledge.