Three challenges for the web, according to its inventor

The world wide web has been around for 28 years now. Web inventor Sir TimBerners-Lee writesabout the challenges facing the modern web, including the loss of control ofour personal data, the spread of misinformation, and the lack oftransparency in political advertising. "Political advertising onlinehas rapidlybecome a sophisticated industry. The fact that most people get theirinformation from just a few platforms and the increasing sophistication ofalgorithms drawing upon rich pools of personal data, means that politicalcampaigns are now building individual adverts targeted directly atusers. Onesource suggests that in the 2016 US election, as many as 50,000variations of adverts were being served every single day on Facebook, anear-impossible situation to monitor. And there are suggestions that somepolitical adverts - in the US and around the world - are being used inunethical ways - to point voters to fake news sites, for instance, or to keepothers away from the polls. Targeted advertising allows a campaign tosay completely different, possibly conflicting things to differentgroups. Is that democratic?"