Digital Sovereignty as an Individual Right

Digital sovereignty is defined as “the ability to have control over your own digital destiny – the data, hardware and software that you rely on and create.” While digital sovereignty is often discussed in the context of national security, geopolitics, and the rights of businesses to protect their data, its importance and relation to the individual’s right to privacy can’t be overstated.

The Right to Privacy

The right to privacy is recognized as a natural human right by

Who Owns Your Data?

Anyone with a smartphone or a laptop, or who can otherwise access the internet, produces data. There is health data, produced by our smartphones tracking our steps, or our watches monitoring our heartbeat, or our smart home devices monitoring our sleeping patterns, for example. People maintain email mailboxes full of data: correspondence with loved ones, conversations with their accountants, transmission of important files. If you have a Gmail account, you can be assured that Google is mining your email for how to leverage your personal communication to advertise to you and your loved ones. In fact, Google collects information on people that send you emails as well, even non-gmail users you correspond with.

Even if you never engage with the internet and live off the grid in a cabin in the woods, it’s very likely that there is some personal data about you on the internet: for example, your name, home address, telephone number, and email address. Scrubbing this data from the internet is no easy chore, and in fact there are now companies that will offer to do this for you for a fee.

It’s important to recognize your rights when it comes to your data. Big corporations such as Google, Microsoft, and Apple want your data as well. How much you allow your personal data to be mined by big tech is up to you and the terms of service you agree to when you sign up for these services. In the United States, we don’t have GDPR or similar protections around digital sovereignty, so it’s important to take ownership of your data into your own hands.

Protecting Your User Data

There are steps you can take to protect yourself from big tech. Unfortunately, most of the steps you can take are not simple or straightforward, and some require a little tech-know-how to implement. It’s been made far too easy to leverage big tech solutions for everyday problems, and we’ve become complicit in handing over the keys to our data to a handful of companies with interests that conflict with our own. Getting that control back requires a bit of effort.

First and foremost is selecting privacy-focused service providers in the first place. Sometimes this means switching from free to paid services. See my note about switching from Gmail to a more privacy-centric service. After all, you have to remember the axiom that if something is free then you are the product. If you’re already entrenched in big tech, like most of us, you will need to migrate away from services that mine and sell your personal data to more privacy-centric ones

At the more extreme end of the spectrum, consider switching from a proprietary operating system to Linux, and wrest your data away from Microsoft or Apple. Or it that’s too much for you, consider switching a la carte from Google services to self-hosted or other services. Something that takes very little adjustment but goes a long way in protecting you is to switch to a privacy-focused web browser, such as Firefox, or even Safari.

Reducing the amount of data you provide via analytics goes a long way to protecting your privacy as well. Consider setting up a Pi-hole or AdGuard Home and installing a good working adblocker like uBlock Origin, if using Firefox. After I set up Adguard Home on my home network, I was particularly surprised by the number of IoT devices that phone home and provide usage and telemetry data on a recurring basis. I don’t need my light switches telling anything about me back to their manufacturer, so I block that traffic.