Berners-Lee in web privacy warning

Founder of the world wide web Tim Berners-Lee used the twentieth anniversary of the web to criticise governments and firms which monitor users' online behaviour, according to a Reuters report.

Speaking at Cern, the European organisation for nuclear research, Berners-Lee said that organisatsions can build up a tremendously accurate picture of users and their habits simply by tracking their web history. "That form of snooping I think is really important to avoid," he is reported as saying.

Berners-Lee is credited with inventing the web when, as a scientist at Cern in the late 80s, he wrote a document entitled Information Managemen: a proposal, which contained many of the ideas which would later be developed to construct the basis of the web we know today.

This isn't the first time he's openly criticised the monitoring of web behaviour. On Wednesday Berners-Lee voiced similar concerns at a Westminster event hosted by the Liberal Democrats to discuss internet privacy. He argued that information of this sort should not be collected at all, and clashed with Kent Ertugrul, chief executive of controversial firm Phorm.

Phorm has come in for frequent criticism in the past for the targeted behavioural marketing service it is developing, which uses web monitoring technology to better understand user habits.

Also at the Cern event, Berners-Lee was reported as discussing the future of the web, which he said would increasingly be accessed from mobile devices. He spoke too about the semantic web - his vision of a web of linked data which will make it easier for machines to read and understand the meaning of web pages than it is at present.