Tim Berners-Lee warns of danger of chaos in unprotected public data

Inventor of world wide web says hackers could cause major disruption with open economic or traffic data

Hackers could use open data such as the information that powers transport apps to create chaos, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has said.

"If you disrupted traffic data for example, to tell everybody that all the roads south of the river are closed, so everybody would go north of the river, that would gridlock you [and] disable the city," he said.