a speech on world wide web

World Wide Web Foundation

[ return to Web Foundation creation announcement page ]

(14 September 2009, Washington, DC, USA) Several months ago, I had dinner with Gary Kebbel, Knight Foundation’s director of journalism programs. What struck me during our conversation was how well Knight’s interests and my own align, regarding the power of the Web. Our shared desire to transform community and to ensure that the Web remains an instrument of innovation have brought me here tonight.

Gary and I discussed specific issues such as “how the Web can help us filter good information from bad” and “how the medium might support democracy” and “what about the blogosphere?” Tonight, rather than examine those specifics, I would like take a broader look at the Web. I would like to consider what the Web can do for society on a scale we have not yet seen. And I would like to enlist your help to get us there.

First allow me to provide a brief overview of how we got to today’s Web, and how that path suggests what our next steps should be.

Back in 1989 I was a programmer at CERN, the high energy physics research center near Geneva. At that time, one huge accelerator, the LEP, had been completed, and work was just starting up on the new Large Hadron Collider (the LHC). Coincidentally, the LHC was just turned on just a few days ago. Right now, there will be a lot of pressure as the results of many years of work are put to the test. But in 1989, there was a slight lull in the pressure between completion of the LEP and the start of work on the new LHC. It was during that lull that my boss, Mike Sendall, allowed me to work on a side project — a global hypertext system I called the World Wide Web.

It took me a couple of months to put together the technology, to design HTTP and HTML and URLs, and build the first browser and server. But the technical design was only part of the work. There was an important social side of the design. The Web does not just connect machines, it connects people. When a link is made, it is a person who makes the link. When a link is followed, it is a person who decides to follow it. Understanding and accounting for the social side of the Web was, and remains, a vital part of encouraging its growth.

For example, it took 18 months for my colleague Robert Cailliau and me to persuade the CERN directors not to charge royalties for use of the Web. Had we failed, the Web would not be here today.

Later on, in the early 1990s, a new threat arose when competing browser developers sought to divide the Web into incompatible islands. I was approached from all sides by people wanting to work together to preserve “One Web.” The whole point of a hypertext link is that it can potentially link to anything out there. One Web is far more interesting and valuable than many small ones.

The community addressed this threat by agreeing, in 1994, to work together in a standards body called the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C. W3C became a successful forum for consensus, where diverse parties have developed some of the core technologies that make the Web work. These technologies — HTML, XML, Style Sheets, to name a few — have fueled billion-dollar industries and connected people like never before.

Thus, by 2000 or so, the Web had been created, it had benefited from a decision to allow anyone to use it at no cost, we had some of the core standards in place, and it was really taking off.

As time went on, however, we realized that standards-making was not all that was needed. Connecting people created new privacy, security, legal, and other social challenges. The popularity of Internet technologies made them targets for abuse (spam, phishing, and so on). In order to protect our investment in the Web and to improve upon it, we needed not just to engineer the present, but to research the future.

It became apparent that for all the interesting work being done around the Web, the analysis and engineering of the Web itself — humanity connected — was not recognised as an object of study. We did not have the right journals for research results, nor the right courses. A few of us at MIT and at Southampton University in the UK realised we had to define a new field, Web Science, and make it happen.

To do so we would need collaboration among researchers from a variety of disciplines (including computer science, economics, mathematics, and psychology) whose perspectives would shed new light on the Web as a system. In 2006, I helped to set up the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) to facilitate and produce the fundamental scientific advances necessary to inform the future design and use of the World Wide Web. We are now working with a growing number of colleagues around the world to develop the academic infrastructure for this new field — including journals, conferences, and curricula — so that the future Web supports the basic social values of trustworthiness, privacy, and respect for social boundaries that are so critical for connecting people.

But once again, this has not been all that is needed. When you think about how the Web is today and dream about how it might be, you must, as always, consider both technology and people. Future technology should be smarter and more powerful, of course. But you cannot ethically turn your attention to developing it without also listening to those people who don’t use the Web at all, or who could use it if only it were different in some way. (I have read that 80% of the world do not have access to the Web. ) The Web has been largely designed by the developed world for the developed world. But it must be much more inclusive in order to be of greater value to us all.

Fortunately, we are headed in that direction. Web Science has as a goal that the Web should serve humanity. W3C’s standards are engineered so that the Web remains accessible to people with disabilities, and does not have an inherent bias towards any particular language, writing direction, or culture. As part of ensuring that the Web meets the needs of more people, W3C recently started new work in two areas: eGovernment, and the role of mobile technology in developing economies.

The role of mobile technology in the poorest regions of the world merits particular attention. Numerous stories illustrate how mobile technology can help people meet their most basic health, nutrition, and education needs. But an increasing number of stories herald innovation, enabled by falling costs, and driven by situations that would be very foreign to most of us here tonight. Mobile banking and SMS used to communicate news of weather or crop prices or weddings are just a few examples of how empowered communities have begun to use information technology to overcome the lack of institutions (such as banks) or other infrastructure (such as roads). We must listen to these stories. Grassroots innovation is what makes the Web great. One way to help foster innovation in underserved communities, for example, is to support those who are already working closely with local populations to provide basic information technology tools and training.

A few years ago I chatted with a woman involved in relief work in war-ravaged areas. I wondered aloud whether Internet access should be low on the priority list after clean water, and other critical resources. She responded by telling me the story of a young man who had taught himself English, and with a connection to the Internet, how he set up his own translation business. This business provided income for the village as well as opening up new communications opportunities. I learned that I should not prioritize for others. Instead, I should listen to their concerns and opportunities and then do what I can to help.

My colleagues and I have identified three avenues — technology innovation, Web Science, and the application of the Web for the benefit of underserved communities — that we believe lead to the next phase of the Web. However, these avenues require significant collaborative efforts, worldwide, by all those who seek to fulfill the original vision of the Web: humanity connected by technology.

To encourage those communities to come together, I am pleased to unveil tonight a new Foundation, the World Wide Web Foundation. The mission of the Foundation is:

* to advance One Web that is free and open,

* to expand the Web’s capability and robustness,

* and to extend the Web’s benefits to all people on the planet.

The Web Foundation will bring together business leaders, technology innovators, academia, government, NGOs, and experts in many fields to tackle challenges that, like the Web, are global in scale. The Web Foundation is in the unique position of being able to learn from the results of projects to accelerate the evolution of the Web.

Gary Kebbel’s enthusiasm and Alberto Ibargüen’s warm support for this vision have personally given me confidence that we are on an important track. Indeed, I am grateful that, in these early stages, the Knight Foundation has generously shown its support with a $200K planning grant. Thanks to the financial and philosophical support of the Knight Foundation, we are now looking for founding donors who share a similar vision for the future Web.

I would like to introduce Steve Bratt, here tonight, who is the CEO of the World Wide Web Foundation. Steve and a small team are coordinating the planning and have done a tremendous amount already to get us to this evening. With the support of founding donors, we will launch the Foundation in early 2009 with an announcement of the first concrete steps toward fulfilling our mission. You can track the Foundation’s progress on www.webfoundation.org.

It is, as I said, the early days, the planning phase. What will it look like if the Foundation succeeds? The Web is a platform, like a piece of paper. It does not determine what you will do with it, it challenges your imagination. If the Foundation achieves all the things I can imagine now, we will have failed.

Our success will be measured by how well we foster the creativity of our children. Whether future scientists have the tools to cure diseases. Whether people, in developed and developing economies alike, can distinguish reliable healthcare information from commercial chaff. Whether the next generation will build systems that support democracy, inform the electorate, and promote accountable debate.

I hope that you will join this global effort to connect humanity.

CERN Accelerating science

The birth of the Web

The World Wide Web was invented by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 while working at CERN

Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989, while working at CERN. The web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.

The first website at CERN – and in the world – was dedicated to the World Wide Web project itself and was hosted on Berners-Lee's NeXT computer. In 2013, CERN launched a project to restore this first ever website :  info.cern.ch .

On 30 April 1993, CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain. Later, CERN made a release available with an open licence, a more sure way to maximise its dissemination. These actions allowed the web to flourish.

A short history of the Web

Licensing the web, browse the first website, the worldwideweb browser, the line-mode browser, the cern effect, internet prehistory at cern, minimising the muddle, good old bitnet, and the rise of the world wi..., on the open internet and the free web, not at all vague and much more than exciting, why bring back the line-mode browser, how the internet came to cern, twenty years of a free and open www.

• svg]:fill-accent-900">

On August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web

By Bill Gourgey

Posted on Aug 6, 2024 8:00 AM EDT

4 minute read

Credit: Popular Science / “The Project”

On August 6, 1991, in a little-known newsgroup–an early-days, primitive version of an internet forum–called alt.hypertext , a soon-to-be-famous computer scientist posted something that would change the technology landscape—and the world—as we knew it. It was a response to a query from one of his fellow newsgroup nerds, who asked if anyone knew of development efforts in the form of “hypertext links enabling retrieval from multiple heterogeneous sources of information?” In other words, could the early Internet become easier to join and navigate?

Tim Berners-Lee , a British computer scientist at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), used that forum to announce to the world his new initiative, writing, “The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to be made to any information anywhere. The address format includes an access method (=namespace), and for most name spaces a hostname and some sort of path.” Before Berners-Lee’s novel idea, to navigate the internet required knowing specific protocols like Telnet or FTP to connect to other servers, which did not have friendly names like popsci.com, but rather arcane computer names that could not easily be discovered. Online discussions involved participating in message-based bulletin board systems enabled by services like Usenet or CompuServe. In his post, Berners-Lee even included one of the first URLs, or Uniform Resource Locators, in his newsgroup post, where more information could be found: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html (the link still works).

With that, the World Wide Web made its debut. Later, an October 1998 Popular Science technology update acknowledged the Web’s anniversary, noting that “Internet use is really about the growing popularity of one part of the Net—the World Wide Web.” The article included early web user statistics such as “77 percent of all Web users are between the ages of 18 and 49,” and 10 million people in the US had shopped online during the first quarter of 1998. It highlighted “portals” like Yahoo, touting services like “personalized news.” With more than 2.6 million websites already available in 1998, the Web had arrived. Seven years earlier, it was still just one computer scientist’s idea.  

Berners-Lee had first proposed his idea to his CERN supervisor, Mike Sendall, more than two years before the prophetic post, in March 1989 . But Sendall’s response had been tepid. According to the World Wide Web Foundation, CERN never funded the project, although by September 1990, Sendall granted Berners-Lee time to work on it independently.

In the August 6 post, Berners-Lee shared information about the WorldWideWeb project’s progress and invited collaboration, explaining the basic concepts behind the web, such as HTML, HTTP, and web browsers that could access and display documents stored on servers. Although the August 6 post has been celebrated for announcing the World Wide Web, it’s worth noting that Berners-Lee also spelled out Open Source principles . He offered up his code for free, encouraged others to “hack it,” and made available all his documentation and data. “Collaborators welcome!” he wrote.

In 1993, the release of the Mosaic web browser (written by Marc Andreessen) democratized internet access, offering a graphical user interface that made the internet more accessible, converting text-based prompts into point-and-click pages. The subsequent introduction of Netscape Navigator (also Andreessen) further accelerated engagement. As noted by Popular Science , by the late 1990s, the internet—via the Web—had begun to affect commerce, media, and personal communication. It might be said that today’s glitzy social media sensations like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok could trace their roots to a humble newsgroup post written in a crude monospace font on August 6, 1991.

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/world-wide-web-turns-30-and-grapples-with-hate-speech-privacy-and-access

World Wide Web turns 30 and grapples with hate speech, privacy and access

GENEVA — At the ripe old age of 30 and with half the globe using it, the World Wide Web is facing growing pains with issues like hate speech, privacy concerns and state-sponsored hacking, its creator says, trumpeting a call to make it better for humanity.

Tim Berners-Lee on Tuesday joined a celebration of the Web and reminisced about his invention at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, starting with a proposal published on March 12, 1989. It opened the way to a technological revolution that has transformed the way people buy goods, share ideas, get information and much more.

It’s also become a place where tech titans scoop up personal data, rival governments spy and seek to scuttle elections, and hate speech and vitriol have thrived — taking the Web far from its roots as a space for progress-oriented minds to collaborate.

As of late 2018, half of the world was online, with the other half often struggling to secure access.

Speaking at a “Web@30” conference at CERN, Berners-Lee acknowledged that a sense among many who are already on the Web has become: “Whoops! The web is not the web we wanted in every respect.”

His World Wide Web Foundation wants to enlist governments, companies, and citizens to take a greater role in shaping the web for good under principles laid out in its “Contract for the Web.”

Under the contract, governments are called upon to make sure everyone can connect to the internet, to keep it available and to respect privacy. Companies are to make the internet affordable, respect privacy and develop technology that will put people — and the “public good” — first. Citizens are to create and to cooperate and respect “civil discourse,” among other things.

“The Contract for the Web is about sitting down in working groups with other people who signed up, and to say, ‘Ok, let’s work out what this really means,'” Berners-Lee said. It was unclear, however, how such rules would be enforced.

Berners-Lee cautioned it was important to strike a balance between oversight and freedom but difficult to agree what it should be.

“Where is the balance between leaving the tech companies to do the right thing and regulating them? Where is the balance between freedom of speech and hate speech?” he said.

The conference, which brought together Internet and tech experts, also gave CERN the chance to showcase its reputation as an open-source incubator of ideas. Berners-Lee worked there in the late 1980s, and had been determined to help bridge a communications and documentation gap among different computer platforms.

As a young English software engineer at CERN, Berners-Lee, who is now 63, came up with the idea for hypertext transfer protocol — the “http” that adorns web addresses — and other building blocks for the web.

The “http” system allowed text and small images to be retrieved through a piece of software — the first browser — which Berners-Lee released in 1990 and is considered the start of the web. In practice, the access to a browser on a home computer made the internet easily accessible to consumers for the first time.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Berners-Lee recalled how his research was helped his former boss at CERN, Mike Sendall, who wanted a pretext to buy a then-new Next computer by Steve Jobs’ Apple needed for his research.

Berners-Lee said Sendall told him to “‘pick a random program to develop on it … Why don’t you do that hypertext thing?'”

Berners-Lee has since become a sort of father figure for the internet community, been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and named as one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century by Time magazine.

While he now wants to get the debate going, other panelists expressed concerns like the increasing concentration of control of the internet by big corporate players, and fretted about a possible splintering of cyberspace among rival countries.

“The challenges come from the same things that make it (the Web) wonderful, and that’s the difficulty,” said conference panelist Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science.

“The openness is wonderful, the connectivity is wonderful, the fact that it was created as a network for academics who are kind of into trusting each other…” she said.

Now with the Web, “there’s an enormous amount of centralization going on, with a few big players becoming gatekeepers. Those few big players have built, basically, surveillance machines,” she said. “It’s based on surveillance profiling us and then targeting us for ads — which wasn’t the original idea at all.”

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info.cern.ch

With 2009 being declared the Year of Creativity and Innovation by the European Union, the 20th anniversary of the Web serves as a timely reminder of the powerful role that creativity in basic research plays as a driver of innovation. I hope you enjoy the celebration.

Rolf Heuer CERN Director-General

March 2009: 20 years of the web

Twenty years ago this month, something happened at CERN that would change the world forever: Tim Berners-Lee handed a document to his supervisor Mike Sendall entitled "Information Management : a Proposal". "Vague, but exciting" is how Mike described it, and he gave Tim the nod to take his proposal forward. The following year, the World Wide Web was born. This week, it's a pleasure and an honour for us to welcome the Web's inventor back to CERN to mark this special anniversary at the place the Web was born.

The celebration

A celebration was held in the Globe on the afternoon of the 13th March to bring together those who created the web at CERN. The event included short presentations from Web veterans, a keynote speech from Tim Berners-Lee, a demonstration of the original browser on the NeXT computer, and a series of presentations from people that Tim believes are doing exciting things with the Web today.

• Press release: CERN celebrates 20 th anniversary of World Wide Web
• Watch the video of the celebrations on the CERN Document Server (CDS) - includes download and alternate player options .

Where the web was born

More information on the beginnings of the web at CERN can be found in the following sites:

• CERN - where the web was born
• The first ever web server: http://info.cern.ch/

© Copyright CERN

CERN press office:

t : +41 (0)22 76 721 41

+41 (0)22 76 734 32

f : +41 (0)22 78 502 47

e: [email protected]

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March 12, 2019

At age 30, World Wide Web is 'not the web we wanted'

by Jamey Keaten

At the ripe old age of 30 and with half the globe using it, the World Wide Web is facing growing pains with issues like hate speech, privacy concerns and state-sponsored hacking, its creator says, trumpeting a call to make it better for humanity.

Tim Berners-Lee on Tuesday joined a celebration of the Web and reminisced about his invention at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, starting with a proposal published on March 12, 1989. It opened the way to a technological revolution that has transformed the way people buy goods, share ideas, get information and much more.

It's also become a place where tech titans scoop up personal data, rival governments spy and seek to scuttle elections, and hate speech and vitriol have thrived—taking the Web far from its roots as a space for progress-oriented minds to collaborate.

As of late 2018, half of the world was online, with the other half often struggling to secure access.

Speaking at a "Web@30" conference at CERN, Berners-Lee acknowledged that a sense among many who are already on the Web has become: "Whoops! The web is not the web we wanted in every respect."

His World Wide Web Foundation wants to enlist governments, companies, and citizens to take a greater role in shaping the web for good under principles laid out in its "Contract for the Web."

Under the contract, governments are called upon to make sure everyone can connect to the internet, to keep it available and to respect privacy. Companies are to make the internet affordable, respect privacy and develop technology that will put people—and the "public good"—first. Citizens are to create and to cooperate and respect "civil discourse," among other things.

"The Contract for the Web is about sitting down in working groups with other people who signed up, and to say, 'Ok, let's work out what this really means,'" Berners-Lee said. It was unclear, however, how such rules would be enforced.

Berners-Lee cautioned it was important to strike a balance between oversight and freedom but difficult to agree what it should be.

"Where is the balance between leaving the tech companies to do the right thing and regulating them? Where is the balance between freedom of speech and hate speech?" he said.

The conference, which brought together Internet and tech experts, also gave CERN the chance to showcase its reputation as an open-source incubator of ideas. Berners-Lee worked there in the late 1980s, and had been determined to help bridge a communications and documentation gap among different computer platforms.

As a young English software engineer at CERN, Berners-Lee, who is now 63, came up with the idea for hypertext transfer protocol—the "http" that adorns web addresses—and other building blocks for the web.

The "http" system allowed text and small images to be retrieved through a piece of software—the first browser—which Berners-Lee released in 1990 and is considered the start of the web. In practice, the access to a browser on a home computer made the internet easily accessible to consumers for the first time.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Berners-Lee recalled how his research was helped his former boss at CERN, Mike Sendall, who wanted a pretext to buy a then-new Next computer by Steve Jobs' Apple needed for his research.

Berners-Lee said Sendall told him to "'pick a random program to develop on it ... Why don't you do that hypertext thing?'"

Berners-Lee has since become a sort of father figure for the internet community, been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and named as one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century by Time magazine.

While he now wants to get the debate going, other panelists expressed concerns like the increasing concentration of control of the internet by big corporate players, and fretted about a possible splintering of cyberspace among rival countries.

"The challenges come from the same things that make it (the Web) wonderful, and that's the difficulty," said conference panelist Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina's School of Information and Library Science.

"The openness is wonderful, the connectivity is wonderful, the fact that it was created as a network for academics who are kind of into trusting each other..." she said.

Now with the Web, "there's an enormous amount of centralization going on, with a few big players becoming gatekeepers. Those few big players have built, basically, surveillance machines," she said. "It's based on surveillance profiling us and then targeting us for ads—which wasn't the original idea at all."

© 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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• Corpus ID: 12477446

Detecting Hate Speech on the World Wide Web

• William Warner , Julia Hirschberg
• Published 7 June 2012
• Computer Science

624 Citations

Hate speech dataset from a white supremacy forum, automated hate speech detection and the problem of offensive language.

• Highly Influenced

Identification of Hate Speech in Social Media

A group-specific approach to nlp for hate speech detection, detection of social biases in hate speech and offensive text, a lexicon-based approach for hate speech detection, detection of offensive language and its severity for low resource language, the thin line between hate and profanity, detection of hate speech using text mining and natural language processing, detecting hate speech in turkish print media: a corpus and a hybrid approach with target-oriented linguistic knowledge, 17 references, offensive language detection using multi-level classification, identifying sources of opinions with conditional random fields and extraction patterns, filtering offensive language in online communities using grammatical relations, classifying subject ratings of emotional speech using acoustic features, opinion mining and sentiment analysis, simple semi-supervised dependency parsing, unsupervised word sense disambiguation rivaling supervised methods, decision lists for lexical ambiguity resolution: application to accent restoration in spanish and french, thumbs up sentiment classification using machine learning techniques, why label when you can search: alternatives to active learning for applying human resources to build classification models under extreme class imbalance, related papers.

Showing 1 through 3 of 0 Related Papers

World Wide Web Day: History, significance and theme

The www was created by english computer scientist tim berners-lee in 1989, while he was working for the european organization for nuclear research (cern) in switzerland. .

Please take our 6-minute community survey on how we fulfill our mission for the world-wide web.

• Accessibility

The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect. Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Founding Director and inventor of the World Wide Web

The power of the web

The Web is fundamentally designed to work for all people, whatever their hardware, software, language, location, or ability. When the web meets this goal, it is accessible to people with a diverse range of hearing, movement, sight, and cognitive ability.

Including everyone

Web accessibility is about designing web sites, applications, technologies, tools, products and services in an inclusive manner, and thus lifting barriers  to communication and interaction that many people face in the physical world.

The mission of the  Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)  is to develop strategies, standards, and supporting resources to help you make the web accessible to people with disabilities, thus enabling everyone to participate equally on the web.

Introduction to Web Accessibility and W3C Standards

About the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)

WAI develops its work through W3C’s consensus-based process, involving different stakeholders in web accessibility. These include industry, disability organizations, government, accessibility research organizations, and more, and in partnership with organizations around the world, pursues accessibility of the web through these primary activities:

• ensuring that W3C standards support accessibility
• developing accessibility guidelines for web content and applications, browsers, and authoring tools
• developing resources to improve web accessibility evaluation processes and tools
• supporting education and outreach on web accessibility
• coordinating with research and development that may impact future accessibility of the web
• promoting harmonized international uptake of web accessibility standards

Shape an accessible Web as a W3C Member

W3C Members play a significant role in shaping the Web .

Contact W3C to learn more about the benefits of W3C Membership to play a significant role yourself!

In this section

• Internationalization
• Web Security

Hackers may have stolen the Social Security numbers of every American. Here’s how to protect yourself

• Copy Link URL Copied!

About four months after a notorious hacking group claimed to have stolen an extraordinary amount of sensitive personal information from a major data broker, a member of the group has reportedly released most of it for free on an online marketplace for stolen personal data.

The breach, which includes Social Security numbers and other sensitive data, could power a raft of identity theft, fraud and other crimes, said Teresa Murray, consumer watchdog director for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

For the record:

2:39 p.m. Aug. 15, 2024 A previous version of this article identified Teresa Murray as the consumer watchdog director for the U.S. Public Information Research Group. She works for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

“If this in fact is pretty much the whole dossier on all of us, it certainly is much more concerning” than prior breaches, Murray said in an interview. “And if people weren’t taking precautions in the past, which they should have been doing, this should be a five-alarm wake-up call for them.”

According to a class-action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the hacking group USDoD claimed in April to have stolen personal records of 2.9 billion people from National Public Data, which offers personal information to employers, private investigators, staffing agencies and others doing background checks. The group offered in a forum for hackers to sell the data, which included records from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, for $3.5 million , a cybersecurity expert said in a post on X.

The lawsuit was reported by Bloomberg Law .

Last week, a purported member of USDoD identified only as Felice told the hacking forum that they were offering “ the full NPD database ,” according to a screenshot taken by BleepingComputer. The information consists of about 2.7 billion records, each of which includes a person’s full name, address, date of birth, Social Security number and phone number, along with alternate names and birth dates, Felice claimed.

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National Public Data didn’t respond to a request for comment, nor has it formally notified people about the alleged breach. It has, however, been telling people who contacted it via email that “we are aware of certain third-party claims about consumer data and are investigating these issues.”

In that email, the company also said that it had “purged the entire database, as a whole, of any and all entries, essentially opting everyone out.” As a result, it said, it has deleted any “non-public personal information” about people, although it added, “We may be required to retain certain records to comply with legal obligations.”

Several news outlets that focus on cybersecurity have looked at portions of the data Felice offered and said they appear to be real people’s actual information. If the leaked material is what it’s claimed to be, here are some of the risks posed and the steps you can take to protect yourself.

The threat of ID theft

The leak purports to provide much of the information that banks, insurance companies and service providers seek when creating accounts — and when granting a request to change the password on an existing account.

A few key pieces appeared to be missing from the hackers’ haul. One is email addresses, which many people use to log on to services. Another is driver’s license or passport photos, which some governmental agencies rely on to verify identities.

Still, Murray of PIRG said that bad actors could do “all kinds of things” with the leaked information, the most worrisome probably being to try to take over someone’s accounts — including those associated with their bank, investments, insurance policies and email. With your name, Social Security number, date of birth and mailing address, a fraudster could create fake accounts in your name or try to talk someone into resetting the password on one of your existing accounts.

“For somebody who’s really suave at it,” Murray said, “the possibilities are really endless.”

It’s also possible that criminals could use information from previous data breaches to add email addresses to the data from the reported National Public Data leak. Armed with all that, Murray said, “you can cause all kinds of chaos, commit all kinds of crimes, steal all kinds of money.”

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How to protect yourself

Data breaches have been so common over the years, some security experts say sensitive information about you is almost certainly available in the dark corners of the internet. And there are a lot of people capable of finding it; VPNRanks, a website that rates virtual private network services, estimates that 5 million people a day will access the dark web through the anonymizing TOR browser, although only a portion of them will be up to no good.

If you suspect that your Social Security number or other important identifying information about you has been leaked, experts say you should put a freeze on your credit files at the three major credit bureaus, Experian , Equifax and TransUnion . You can do so for free, and it will prevent criminals from taking out loans, signing up for credit cards and opening financial accounts under your name. The catch is that you’ll need to remember to lift the freeze temporarily if you are obtaining or applying for something that requires a credit check.

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Placing a freeze can be done online or by phone, working with each credit bureau individually. PIRG cautions never to do so in response to an unsolicited email or text purporting to be from one of the credit agencies — such a message is probably the work of a scammer trying to dupe you into revealing sensitive personal information.

For more details, check out PIRG’s step-by-step guide to credit freezes .

You can also sign up for a service that monitors your accounts and the dark web to guard against identity theft, typically for a fee. If your data is exposed in a breach, the company whose network was breached will often provide one of these services for free for a year or more.

If you want to know whether you have something to worry about, multiple websites and service providers such as Google and Experian can scan the dark web for your information to see whether it’s out there. But those aren’t specific to the reported National Public Data breach. For that information, try a free tool from the cybersecurity company Pentester that offers to search for your information in the breached National Public Data files . Along with the search results, Pentester displays links to the sites where you can freeze your credit reports.

As important as these steps are to stop people from opening new accounts in your name, they aren’t much help protecting your existing accounts. Oddly enough, those accounts are especially vulnerable to identity thieves if you haven’t signed up for online access to them, Murray said — that’s because it’s easier for thieves to create a login and password while pretending to be you than it is for them to crack your existing login and password.

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Of course, having strong passwords that are different for every service and changed periodically helps. Password manager apps offer a simple way to create and keep track of passwords by storing them in the cloud, essentially requiring you to remember one master password instead of dozens of long and unpronounceable ones. These are available both for free (such as Apple’s iCloud Keychain) and for a fee .

Beyond that, experts say it’s extremely important to sign up for two-factor authentication. That adds another layer of security on top of your login and password. The second factor is usually something sent or linked to your phone, such as a text message; a more secure approach is to use an authenticator app, which will keep you secure even if your phone number is hijacked by scammers .

Yes, scammers can hijack your phone number through techniques called SIM swaps and port-out fraud , causing more identity-theft nightmares. To protect you on that front, AT&T allows you to create a passcode restricting access to your account; T-Mobile offers optional protection against your phone number being switched to a new device, and Verizon automatically blocks SIM swaps by shutting down both the new device and the existing one until the account holder weighs in with the existing device.

Your worst enemy may be you

As much or more than hacked data, scammers also rely on people to reveal sensitive information about themselves. One common tactic is to pose as your bank, employer, phone company or other service provider with whom you’ve done business and then try to hook you with a text or email message.

Banks, for example, routinely tell customers that they will not ask for their account information by phone. Nevertheless, scammers have coaxed victims into providing their account numbers, logins and passwords by posing as bank security officers trying to stop an unauthorized withdrawal or some other supposedly urgent threat.

People may even get an official-looking email purportedly from National Public Data, offering to help them deal with the reported leak, Murray said. “It’s not going to be NPD trying to help. It’s going to be some bad guy overseas” trying to con them out of sensitive information, she said.

It’s a good rule of thumb never to click on a link or call a phone number in an unsolicited text or email. If the message warns about fraud on your account and you don’t want to simply ignore it, look up the phone number for that company’s fraud department (it’s on the back of your debit and credit cards) and call for guidance.

“These bad guys, this is what they do for a living,” Murray said. They might send out tens of thousands of queries and get only one response, but that response could net them $10,000 from an unwitting victim. “Ten thousand dollars in one day for having one hit with one victim, that’s a pretty good return on investment,” she said. “That’s what motivates them.”

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Abusive Language Detection in Online User Content

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• Alhazmi A Mahmud R Idris N Mohamed Abo M Eke C (2024) A systematic literature review of hate speech identification on Arabic Twitter data: research challenges and future directions PeerJ Computer Science 10.7717/peerj-cs.1966 10 (e1966) Online publication date: 2-Apr-2024 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.1966
• Alqahtani A Ilyas M (2024) An Ensemble-Based Multi-Classification Machine Learning Classifiers Approach to Detect Multiple Classes of Cyberbullying Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction 10.3390/make6010009 6 :1 (156-170) Online publication date: 12-Jan-2024 https://doi.org/10.3390/make6010009
• Faraz A Ahsan F Mounsef J Karamitsos I Kanavos A (2024) Enhancing Child Safety in Online Gaming: The Development and Application of Protectbot, an AI-Powered Chatbot Framework Information 10.3390/info15040233 15 :4 (233) Online publication date: 19-Apr-2024 https://doi.org/10.3390/info15040233
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