The phrase “digital sovereignty” is much in use these days.
Well, it is in the parts of the Internet that I frequent.
Unless you do this stuff for a living, you may see it a lot less often than I do.
“Digital sovereignty”, though, is the term most European techies have adopted to refer to their newly-popularized need for the computer systems on which they depend to be subject to their local laws.
Rather than, as it has been in the past, mostly just being subject to U.S. law.
This is, in general, a good thing.
I don’t much like European law, especially on speech, since they are far more open to government intrusion in personal affairs than even the U.S. is.
Though their consumer data protection laws are actually better than most places in the U.S., so at least on that front they would really benefit from using local rather than U.S.-owned or -hosted systems.
But it’s their country and their laws, not mine, and their computer systems should function in accordance with that law.
But it’s not just countries that benefit from controlling their own computer systems.
You can too.
Like a country, if you control the computer systems you use, then you get to set the rules by which they operate.
Although, also like a country, your neighbors can pressure you to at least follow commonly-accepted standards.
But other than that, you’re free to make them work how you want rather than how the marketing department at some .com in San Francisco wants.
You can do all this for yourself.
I can’t teach you how to do this for yourself in one blog post, but to get you started here are some of the software packages I use to manage all of my own Internet services:
- /e/os : a free Android-compatible operating system for phones and tablets
- Haiku : a free desktop/laptop operating system
- OpenBSD : a free server operating system
- VaultWarden : a free shared password manager
- iRedMail : a free email, contacts and calendar server
- Pleroma : a free Mastodon-compatible server
That’s not a complete list of all the systems I host for myself, but having just these would cover your phone, laptop, email and calendaring, and social networking that only you control.
Which is a big start.
This stuff is not easy, though, which is why people like me can make a living at it. You may not have the time to learn all of this for yourself.
In which case a good approach is to try to use the smallest and most-local service provider you can find for anything you can’t do for yourself.
If you can, use a small cell phone provider and a local ISP.
Choose distributed social networks, like the “fediverse”/Mastodon instead of centralized ones like facebook or TikTok and choose an instance on that network whose policies or culture you agree with.
But do as much for yourself as you can.
And for what you can’t, choose providers that are small enough and local enough that you can actually know something about them since you’re trusting them with a significant part of your life.
But the important part here is that you can do all this for yourself, even if you don’t have the time to learn it right now. You are capable of learning it, and a lot of good people have spent years of their lives making sure all the tools you need are available and free.
