Tim Berners-Lee: demand your data from Google and Facebook | Technology | guardian.co.uk

World Wide Web worries

"He said web users needed to be more conscious that websites that seemed to be permanent fixtures of the online world could disappear within a few years. "Whatever social site, wherever you put your data, you should make sure that you can get it back and get it back in a standard form. And in fact if I were you I would do that regularly, just like you back up your computer … maybe our grandchildren depending on which website we use may or may not be able to see our photos."
Berners-Lee said he was concerned by the rise of so-called "native apps" such as those produced for the iPhone and iPad because they were not searchable. "Every time somebody puts a magazine on a phone now and doesn't put it on to a web app [a form of open software] you know we lose a whole lot of information to the general public discourse – I can't link to it, so I can't tweet it, I can't discuss it, I can't like it, I can't hate it.""

Tim Berners-Lee: demand your data from Google and Facebook | Technology | guardian.co.uk