Throughout history, the expansion of human rights has followed the expansion of human capability. As we’ve gained new powers, we’ve developed new frameworks for protecting individual autonomy. The digital age demands such a framework now.
A New Frontier of Rights
Consider what previous generations fought for: freedom of movement, freedom of association, freedom of expression, and privacy in one’s home and papers. Now consider what the digital age has created: digital movement through browsing and searching, digital association through online communities, digital expression through publishing and creating, and digital papers in the form of our documents, photos, and messages.
The parallel is obvious. The same rights that protect our physical existence must extend to our digital existence.
The Current Reality
Today, most people’s digital lives are governed not by law but by terms of service. These are unilateral contracts drafted by corporations, modifiable at any time, enforced by algorithms. This arrangement would be unacceptable in any other domain of life.
Imagine if your landlord could evict you without explanation, your bank could freeze your assets on suspicion alone, or the postal service could read and censor your mail. Yet this is precisely the situation in our digital lives.
In 2021, a San Francisco father photographed his toddler’s infection to send to a telemedicine nurse. Google’s AI flagged the medical photos as abuse, instantly disabling his entire digital life: his email, contacts, over a decade of family photos, his phone number. Police investigated for ten months before concluding no crime occurred. Google refused to restore his account.
In Michigan, an unemployment algorithm falsely charged over 40,000 people with fraud without human review. An agency audit later found 93% of charges were erroneous. More than 1,000 families filed for bankruptcy.
These aren’t edge cases. They’re the predictable result of a system where algorithms make consequential decisions about our lives with no transparency, no due process, and no accountability.
Principles of Digital Self-Determination
The concept of digital self-determination emerged from Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court in 1983, which established that citizens must know who knows what about them, when, and on what occasion. This principle directly inspired the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation and continues shaping global policy.
True digital sovereignty rests on several key principles. First, ownership: your data is your property, and you have the right to access it, move it, and delete it. Second, transparency: you have the right to understand how systems that affect you operate. Third, due process: before any adverse action, you have the right to explanation and appeal. Fourth, interoperability: you have the right to use services that can communicate with each other. Fifth, exit: you have the right to leave any platform with your data intact.
From Philosophy to Practice
These aren’t merely abstract principles. They have practical implications for how we design, regulate, and use technology. The European Union has built the most comprehensive digital rights architecture in the world, including rights to data portability, protection from purely automated decisions, and requirements that platforms explain content removal.
But significant gaps remain. The United States lacks comprehensive federal privacy legislation. Freedom House reports fourteen consecutive years of global internet freedom decline.
As scholar Shoshana Zuboff writes, the right to sanctuary is the condition of freedom. Without sanctuary there can be no autonomy, no agency, no deliberation, no choice, no individual will. When platforms can delete accounts without explanation, when algorithms make consequential decisions invisibly, when behavioral data is extracted to predict and shape our actions, the conditions for genuine self-determination erode.
The tech giants set out to become utilities, as essential to your life as electricity and water. They succeeded. The question now is whether digital citizens will demand the protections that utility customers have long enjoyed.
The future of digital rights will be determined by those who show up to shape it.