In a scenario that some privacy experts saw as naïve, the technology pioneer said an insurance company, for instance, could agree not to use personal details gleaned from Facebook to set the most profitable premium for a would-be customer, even if one of its agents was connected to the prospective customer on the social network.

The problem, according to Berners-Lee, is that "social networking silos" like Facebook and Google "have the data and I don't. "One side of this that I think gets insufficient airing is the value to me of that data," Berners-Lee said.

Berners-Lee said location data from his mobile phones could help him track his exercise habits, for example.

It's hard to say if reams of unstructured data would help individuals less tech-savvy than Berners-Lee, however. Justin Brookman, director of the Project on Consumer Privacy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, was skeptical. But Ryan Calo, with the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University, said he thought the data could be quite helpful to individuals.

The privacy experts agreed that releasing the data would educate consumers on the issue of Internet privacy, which can seem abstract.