current data ownership model. Instead of companies owning user data, users maintain a single source of truth for their personal information. It integrates and extends all those established identity standards and technologies mentioned earlier, and forms a comprehensive stack that places personal identity at the architectural center.

This identity-first paradigm means that every digital interaction begins with the authenticated individual who maintains control over their data. Applications become interchangeable views into user-owned data, rather than data silos themselves. This enables unprecedented interoperability, as services can securely access precisely the information they need while respecting user-defined boundaries.

Solid ensures that user intentions are transparently expressed and reliably enforced across the entire ecosystem. Instead of each application implementing its own custom authorization logic and access controls, Solid establishes a standardized declarative approach where permissions are explicitly defined through control lists or policies attached to resources. Users can specify who has access to what data with granular precision, using simple statements like
?Alice can read this document? or ?Bob can write to this folder.? These permission rules remain consistent, regardless of which application is accessing the data, eliminating the fragmentation and unpredictability of traditional authorization systems.

This architectural shift decouples applications from data infrastructure. Unlike Web 2.0 platforms like Facebook, which require massive back-end systems to store, process, and monetize user data, Solid applications can be lightweight and focused solely on functionality. Developers no longer need to build and maintain extensive data storage systems, surveillance infrastructure, or analytics pipelines. Instead, they can build specialized tools that request access to specific data in users? wallets, with the heavy lifting of data storage and access control handled by the protocol itself.

Let?s take healthcare as an example. The current system forces patients to spread pieces of their medical history across countless proprietary databases controlled by insurance companies, hospital networks, and electronic health record vendors. Patients frustratingly become a patchwork rather than a person, because they often can?t access their own complete medical history, let alone correct mistakes. Meanwhile, those third-party databases suffer regular breaches. The Solid protocol enables a fundamentally different approach. Patients maintain their own comprehensive medical record, with data cryptographically signed by trusted providers, in their own data wallet. When visiting a new healthcare provider, patients can arrive with their complete, verifiable medical history rather than starting from zero or waiting for bureaucratic record transfers.

When a patient needs to see a specialist, they can grant temporary, specific access to relevant portions of their medical history. For example, a patient referred to a cardiologist could share only cardiac-related records and essential background information. Or, on the flip side, the patient can share new and rich sources of related data to the specialist, like health and nutrition data. The specialist, in turn, can add their findings and treatment recommendations directly to the patient?s wallet, with a cryptographic signature verifying medical credentials. This process eliminates dangerous information gaps while ensuring that patients maintain an appropriate role in who sees what about them and why.

When a patient -- doctor relationship ends, the patient retains all records generated during that relationship -- unlike today?s system where changing providers often means losing access to one?s historical records. The departing doctor?s signed contributions remain verifiable parts of the medical history, but they no longer have direct access to the patient?s wallet without explicit permission.

For insurance claims, patients can provide temporary, auditable access to specific information needed for processing -- no more and no less. Insurance companies receive verified data directly relevant to claims but should not be expected to have uncontrolled hidden comprehensive profiles or retain information longer than safe under privacy regulations. This approach dramatically reduces unauthorized data use, risk of breaches (privacy and integrity), and administrative costs.

Perhaps most transformatively, this architecture enables patients to selectively participate in medical research while maintaining privacy. They could contribute anonymized or personalized data to studies matching their interests or conditions, with granular control over what information is shared and for how long. Researchers could gain access to larger, more diverse datasets while participants would maintain control over their information -- creating a proper ethical model for advancing medical knowledge.

The implications extend far beyond healthcare. In financial services, customers could maintain verified transaction histories and creditworthiness credentials independently of credit bureaus. In education, students could collect verified credentials and portfolios that they truly own rather than relying on institutions? siloed records. In employment, workers could maintain portable professional histories with verified credentials from past employers. In each case, Solid enables individuals to be the masters of their own data while allowing verification and selective sharing.

The economics of Web 2.0 pushed us toward centralized platforms and surveillance capitalism, but there has always been a better way. Solid brings different pieces together into a cohesive whole that enables the identity-first architecture we should have had all along. The protocol doesn?t just solve technical problems; it corrects the fundamental misalignment of incentives that has made the modern web increasingly hostile to both users and developers.

As we look to a future of increased digitization across all sectors of society, the need for this architectural shift becomes even more apparent. Individuals should be able to maintain and present their own verified digital identity and history, rather than being at the mercy of siloed institutional databases. The Solid protocol makes this future technically possible.

This essay was written with Davi Ottenheimer, and originally appeared on The Inrupt Blog.

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Subliminal Learning in AIs

[2025.07.25] Today?s freaky LLM behavior:

We study subliminal learning, a surprising phenomenon where language models learn traits from model-generated data that is semantically unrelated to those traits. For example, a ?student? model learns to prefer owls when trained on sequences of numbers generated by a ?teacher? model that prefers owls. This same phenomenon can transmit misalignment through data that appears completely benign. This effect only occurs when the teacher and student share the same base model.

Interesting secu

--- BBBS/LiR v4.10 Toy-7
* Origin: TCOB1: https/binkd/telnet binkd.rima.ie (21:1/229)