Entries Tagged "Inrupt"

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Privacy for Agentic AI

Sooner or later, it’s going to happen. AI systems will start acting as agents, doing things on our behalf with some degree of autonomy. I think it’s worth thinking about the security of that now, while its still a nascent idea.

In 2019, I joined Inrupt, a company that is commercializing Tim Berners-Lee’s open protocol for distributed data ownership. We are working on a digital wallet that can make use of AI in this way. (We used to call it an “active wallet.” Now we’re calling it an “agentic wallet.”)

I talked about this a bit at the RSA Conference earlier this week, in my keynote talk about AI and trust. Any useful AI assistant is going to require a level of access—and therefore trust—that rivals what we currently our email provider, social network, or smartphone.

This Active Wallet is an example of an AI assistant. It’ll combine personal information about you, transactional data that you are a party to, and general information about the world. And use that to answer questions, make predictions, and ultimately act on your behalf. We have demos of this running right now. At least in its early stages. Making it work is going require an extraordinary amount of trust in the system. This requires integrity. Which is why we’re building protections in from the beginning.

Visa is also thinking about this. It just announced a protocol that uses AI to help people make purchasing decisions.

I like Visa’s approach because it’s an AI-agnostic standard. I worry a lot about lock-in and monopolization of this space, so anything that lets people easily switch between AI models is good. And I like that Visa is working with Inrupt so that the data is decentralized as well. Here’s our announcement about its announcement:

This isn’t a new relationship—we’ve been working together for over two years. We’ve conducted a successful POC and now we’re standing up a sandbox inside Visa so merchants, financial institutions and LLM providers can test our Agentic Wallets alongside the rest of Visa’s suite of Intelligent Commerce APIs.

For that matter, we welcome any other company that wants to engage in the world of personal, consented Agentic Commerce to come work with us as well.

I joined Inrupt years ago because I thought that Solid could do for personal data what HTML did for published information. I liked that the protocol was an open standard, and that it distributed data instead of centralizing it. AI agents need decentralized data. “Wallet” is a good metaphor for personal data stores. I’m hoping this is another step towards adoption.

Posted on May 2, 2025 at 2:04 PM • View Comments

Data Wallets Using the Solid Protocol

I am the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc., the company that is commercializing Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid open W3C standard for distributed data ownership. This week, we announced a digital wallet based on the Solid architecture.

Details are here, but basically a digital wallet is a repository for personal data and documents. Right now, there are hundreds of different wallets, but no standard. We think designing a wallet around Solid makes sense for lots of reasons. A wallet is more than a data store—data in wallets is for using and sharing. That requires interoperability, which is what you get from an open standard. It also requires fine-grained permissions and robust security, and that’s what the Solid protocols provide.

I think of Solid as a set of protocols for decoupling applications, data, and security. That’s the sort of thing that will make digital wallets work.

Posted on July 25, 2024 at 7:05 AM • View Comments

Inrupt’s Solid Announcement

Earlier this year, I announced that I had joined Inrupt, the company commercializing Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid specification:

The idea behind Solid is both simple and extraordinarily powerful. Your data lives in a pod that is controlled by you. Data generated by your things—your computer, your phone, your IoT whatever—is written to your pod. You authorize granular access to that pod to whoever you want for whatever reason you want. Your data is no longer in a bazillion places on the Internet, controlled by you-have-no-idea-who. It’s yours. If you want your insurance company to have access to your fitness data, you grant it through your pod. If you want your friends to have access to your vacation photos, you grant it through your pod. If you want your thermostat to share data with your air conditioner, you give both of them access through your pod.

This week, Inrupt announced the availability of the commercial-grade Enterprise Solid Server, along with a small but impressive list of initial customers of the product and the specification (like the UK National Health Service). This is a significant step forward to realizing Tim’s vision:

The technologies we’re releasing today are a component of a much-needed course correction for the web. It’s exciting to see organizations using Solid to improve the lives of everyday people—through better healthcare, more efficient government services and much more.

These first major deployments of the technology will kick off the network effect necessary to ensure the benefits of Solid will be appreciated on a massive scale. Once users have a Solid Pod, the data there can be extended, linked, and repurposed in valuable new ways. And Solid’s growing community of developers can be rest assured that their apps will benefit from the widespread adoption of reliable Solid Pods, already populated with valuable data that users are empowered to share.

A few news articles. Slashdot thread.

Posted on November 13, 2020 at 2:17 PM • View Comments

Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

For decades, I have been talking about the importance of individual privacy. For almost as long, I have been using the metaphor of digital feudalism to describe how large companies have become central control points for our data. And for maybe half a decade, I have been talking about the world-sized robot that is the Internet of Things, and how digital security is now a matter of public safety. And most recently, I have been writing and speaking about how technologists need to get involved with public policy.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I have joined a company called Inrupt that is working to bring Tim Berners-Lee’s distributed data ownership model that is Solid into the mainstream. (I think of Inrupt basically as the Red Hat of Solid.) I joined the Inrupt team last summer as its Chief of Security Architecture, and have been in stealth mode until now.

The idea behind Solid is both simple and extraordinarily powerful. Your data lives in a pod that is controlled by you. Data generated by your things—your computer, your phone, your IoT whatever—is written to your pod. You authorize granular access to that pod to whoever you want for whatever reason you want. Your data is no longer in a bazillion places on the Internet, controlled by you-have-no-idea-who. It’s yours. If you want your insurance company to have access to your fitness data, you grant it through your pod. If you want your friends to have access to your vacation photos, you grant it through your pod. If you want your thermostat to share data with your air conditioner, you give both of them access through your pod.

The ideal would be for this to be completely distributed. Everyone’s pod would be on a computer they own, running on their network. But that’s not how it’s likely to be in real life. Just as you can theoretically run your own email server but in reality you outsource it to Google or whoever, you are likely to outsource your pod to those same sets of companies. But maybe pods will come standard issue in home routers. Even if you do hand your pod over to some company, it’ll be like letting them host your domain name or manage your cell phone number. If you don’t like what they’re doing, you can always move your pod—just like you can take your cell phone number and move to a different carrier. This will give users a lot more power.

I believe this will fundamentally alter the balance of power in a world where everything is a computer, and everything is producing data about you. Either IoT companies are going to enter into individual data sharing agreements, or they’ll all use the same language and protocols. Solid has a very good chance of being that protocol. And security is critical to making all of this work. Just trying to grasp what sort of granular permissions are required, and how the authentication flows might work, is mind-altering. We’re stretching pretty much every Internet security protocol to its limits and beyond just setting this up.

Building a secure technical infrastructure is largely about policy, but there’s also a wave of technology that can shift things in one direction or the other. Solid is one of those technologies. It moves the Internet away from overly-centralized power of big corporations and governments and towards more rational distributions of power; greater liberty, better privacy, and more freedom for everyone.

I’ve worked with Inrupt’s CEO, John Bruce, at both of my previous companies: Counterpane and Resilient. It’s a little weird working for a start-up that is not a security company. (While security is essential to making Solid work, the technology is fundamentally about the functionality.) It’s also a little surreal working on a project conceived and spearheaded by Tim Berners-Lee. But at this point, I feel that I should only work on things that matter to society. So here I am.

Whatever happens next, it’s going to be a really fun ride.

EDITED TO ADD (2/23): News article. HackerNews thread.

EDITED TO ADD (2/25): More press coverage.

Posted on February 21, 2020 at 2:04 PM • View Comments

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.