Remarkable MeWe Realizing Web Inventor’s Extraordinary Privacy Vision

Celebrating the World Wide Web’s 30th anniversary in March, I found myself reflecting on the remarkable journey the Web has taken — and contemplating where it might be heading. The Web’s inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is a friend of mine and an important advisor to MeWe, the social network I founded that’s become the leading Facebook challenger. Together, we’re fighting to make the Web the way it was always intended: free, open, safe, and where users have control of their data and privacy. Here’s a look back at how it all started, and what’s next.

Thirty years ago, Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist, was working at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). At the time, the Internet was developing quickly, and already connected millions of computers together, but Berners-Lee realized that computers could share information with each other far more effectively via a new technology called hypertext. On March 12, 1989, Berners-Lee submitted the proposal for what would become the World Wide Web. To the digital world, it was the equivalent of discovering the Earth.

Originally a bridge for communication between university scientists, Berners-Lee and his team recognized the Web had far greater potential, and so they advocated to ensure that the underlying code of the Web would be available to all, and free forever. While Berners-Lee knew the Web had potential, what he didn’t realize at the time was that his invention would soon become the most powerful medium for knowledge and communication in the history of the world.

In 1998, less than a decade after the Web’s creation, I, along with a team of designers and programmers, took the spirit of Berners-Lee’s vision and created two of the world’s first social networking platforms (called “community portals” back then): SuperFamily and SuperFriends (you’ll excuse me if the site looks a tad dated in 2019). While a very few networks were nascent already, 1998 was truly the blossoming of this new paradigm.

My intention for these early social networks I brought to life was to use the free and open communication capabilities of the Web to help bring friends, family, and like-minded people together through the magic of technology. Launched around the same time as a few other pioneering social networks, SuperFamily and SuperFriends (along with SuperTeams, SuperAlumni, SuperFamilia, and SuperGifts) helped make it easy and fun to share the moments that make up our personal lives and paved the way for the social media world of today.

Other social networks soon followed, such as Yahoo Groups in 2001, Friendster in 2002, and MySpace in 2003. And then came Facebook. Started by Mark Zuckerberg from his Harvard dorm in 2004, Facebook was presented as an altruistic platform that would connect the entire world. As Facebook took off and quickly spread like wildfire, it became apparent that their true objective was to spy on their users, aggregating and exploiting their users’ personal data through targeting and manipulation in a new business model now known as surveillance capitalism.

User protection and privacy were tossed aside, as Facebook’s business model impelled them to spy on their users both within Facebook and across the Web, all the while harvesting their users’ data so that Facebook’s true customers, marketers, advertisers, and governments, can target them.

By this time, I had already sold SuperFamily and SuperFriends amidst the Web’s first shake out, and was enjoying my new role as a high tech consultant and author of books on personal greatness, titled “Habitually Great.” But as Facebook’s business and tracking model evolved, I was compelled to speak out. They had rapidly evolved into dominance and were distorting the purpose of the social media industry that I had helped create.

In 2012, I was interviewed by Fox News the day before Facebook went public and was asked about their future prospects. During the interview, I called out Facebook for their deceitful and unethical behavior, particularly their violation of the human right to privacy. “I think it’s weird and creepy if I’m doing anything online and I don’t know who’s going to see it,” as I told Fox News. I correctly predicted then that Facebook’s disregard for user privacy would eventually become a major problem for the company.

I also predicted that privacy would become the next big wave, and advocated for privacy-by-design within social networks whereby tech companies would build privacy into their DNA. This is what led me to found the first social network engineered with privacy-by-design: MeWe.

Berners-Lee had also started speaking out against the more negative consequences of the Web and social networks, and campaigned for greater privacy and control for users and more accountability for the tech giants. You see, Berners-Lee didn’t invent the Web for companies or governments to spy, target, manipulate, and collect or sell users’ data. He’s made it his mandate and mission to fix these issues — and MeWe is aligned with that mission.

On the 25th anniversary of the Web, back in 2014, when MeWe was known by its original name, Sgrouples, Berners-Lee did an interview with CNET and stated: “There is a social network, Sgrouples, that specifically is privacy-aware. You can share stuff there that they won’t share with anybody else.”

Creating Sgrouples, aka MeWe, is what eventually led Berners-Lee and I to connect later in 2014. Through our conversations and with similar values and viewpoints, he joined MeWe’s Advisory Board.

Built on our shared ideals of user control and privacy, MeWe launched officially in 2016 at South by Southwest (SXSW), and began to grow rapidly, winning prestigious awards, including SXSW Start-Up of the Year Finalist, and was named one of the Best Entrepreneurial Companies in America by Entrepreneur Magazine.

Berners-Lee stated then, “The original idea of the Web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information. The power to abuse the open Internet has become so tempting both for government and big companies. MeWe gives the power of the Internet back to the people with a platform built for connection, collaboration and privacy.”

Meanwhile, Facebook has been entangled in an endless series of privacy infractions and countless fines, from Cambridge Analytica harvesting 87 million Facebook users’ personal data without their consent for political targeting, to the revelation in December 2018 that Facebook shared private user messages with Netflix, Spotify, and other business partners, up to the recent news that Facebook did not securely store user passwords, exposing them in plaintext to thousands of employees — it’s no wonder why Facebook has lost millions of members over the last couple years and top executives are now jumping ship.

As Facebook’s privacy problems have continued to snowball, MeWe’s focus on user control and privacy has only strengthened. Facebook’s privacy failures underscore MeWe’s successes. Berners-Lee tweeted about MeWe in March 2018, in the aftermath of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, noting, “Yes there is more than one social network…”

MeWe is now booming with 405% growth in 2018, and already in 2019 it’s growing twice as fast. MeWe became the №1 Trending Social App in the Google Play Store for multiple days in December 2018.

Speaking to Science Business in March 2019, Berners Lee said of MeWe, “It’s one of the companies where there is a privacy ‘bill of rights.’ They respect your data.” In another interview around the same time, with MediaNama, Berners-Lee said, “Social networks like MeWe have respected privacy, where you can share your photos with family and friends in a privacy preserving way. The moment there’s a problem with another platform, a million more people join MeWe.”

Over the last 30 years, Berners-Lee’s groundbreaking invention has totally changed the world, and he is still working tirelessly to improve the Web and make it even greater for everyone. This includes his current work on Solid, an open-source project to give Web users complete control over data, including the freedom to choose where their data resides and who is allowed to access it.

MeWe plans to be an early adopter of Solid, as it is the ultimate fulfillment of Berners-Lee’s vision for data ownership and privacy. At MeWe, we are inspired by and share Berners-Lee’s extraordinary vision, and I am honored to be working in tandem with him to ensure the future of the Web is a bright one that respects the fundamental right of all people worldwide to have private conversations using remarkable communication technology.

Mark Weinstein is a leading privacy advocate and the CEO of MeWe, the award-winning social network with a Privacy Bill of Rights and the №1 Trending Social Site.

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