Essays in the Category "Integrity"
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The AI Agents of Tomorrow Need Data Integrity
From data inputs to decisions, nothing can be corrupted
Think of the Web as a digital territory with its own social contract. In 2014, Tim Berners-Lee called for a “Magna Carta for the Web” to restore the balance of power between individuals and institutions. This mirrors the original charter’s purpose: ensuring that those who occupy a territory have a meaningful stake in its governance.
Web 3.0—the distributed, decentralized Web of tomorrow—is finally poised to change the Internet’s dynamic by returning ownership to data creators. This will change many things about what’s often described as the “CIA triad” of …
The Return to Identity-First Architecture: How the Solid Protocol Restores Digital Agency
Solid brings different pieces together into a cohesive whole that enables the identity-first architecture we should have had all along.
The current state of digital identity is a mess. Your personal information is scattered across hundreds of locations: social media companies, IoT companies, government agencies, websites you have accounts on, and data brokers you’ve never heard of. These entities collect, store, and trade your data, often without your knowledge or consent. It’s both redundant and inconsistent. You have hundreds, maybe thousands, of fragmented digital profiles that often contain contradictory or logically impossible information. Each serves its own purpose, yet there is no central override and control to serve you—as the identity owner…
The Age of Integrity
We need to talk about data integrity.
Narrowly, the term refers to ensuring that data isn’t tampered with, either in transit or in storage. Manipulating account balances in bank databases, removing entries from criminal records, and murder by removing notations about allergies from medical records are all integrity attacks.
More broadly, integrity refers to ensuring that data is correct and accurate from the point it is collected, through all the ways it is used, modified, transformed, and eventually deleted. Integrity-related incidents include malicious actions, but also inadvertent mistakes…
AI and Trust
Note: The text in this column is taken, for the most part verbatim, from a talk by Mr. Schneier during the 2025 RSA Conference in San Francisco, CA on April 29, 2025.
This is a discussion about artificial intelligence (AI), trust, power, and integrity. I am going to make four basic arguments:
- There are two kinds of trust—interpersonal and social—and we regularly confuse them. What matters here is social trust, which is about reliability and predictability in society.
- Our confusion will increase with AI, and the corporations controlling AI will use that confusion to take advantage of us…
Web 3.0 Requires Data Integrity
New integrity-focused standards are necessary to enable the trusted AI services of tomorrow.
If you’ve ever taken a computer security class, you’ve probably learned about the three legs of computer security—confidentiality, integrity, and availability—known as the CIA triad. When we talk about a system being secure, that’s what we’re referring to. All are important, but to different degrees in different contexts. In a world populated by artificial intelligence (AI) systems and artificial intelligent agents, integrity will be paramount.
What is data integrity? It’s ensuring that no one can modify data—that’s the security angle—but it’s much more than that. It encompasses accuracy, completeness, and quality of data—all over both time and space. It’s preventing accidental data loss; the “undo” button is a primitive integrity measure. It’s also making sure that data is accurate when it’s collected—that it comes from a trustworthy source, that nothing important is missing, and that it doesn’t change as it moves from format to format. The ability to restart your computer is another integrity measure…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.