"It's good for companies to make their information available to people. But from my point of view it's just so people have an awareness of what sort of information companies have about them, and collect, and track and keep," Brookman said.

Calo thought seeing the data companies have collected on them would clarify privacy questions for many users.

Compared to "reading generalities about the information that a company might have about you, which is what privacy policies are, being able to access the information that the company does have is much better," he said.

In order for users to draw the kind of useful personal insights Berners-Lee pointed to, data from one source would have to be compatible with data from another. As an advocate of the "open Web," Berners-Lee often argues for data formats to be standardized.