Think about everything you’d lose if Google decided to close your account tomorrow. Your email going back a decade. Every photo of your kids. The documents you’ve been working on. Your phone number. Your calendar. Your contacts. All of it, gone, with no explanation and no appeal.
This isn’t hypothetical. In 2021, a San Francisco father took photos of his toddler’s infection at his doctor’s request during a telehealth visit. Google’s AI flagged the medical images and permanently disabled his entire account. Police investigated for ten months and cleared him completely. Google still refused to give his account back. A decade of his family’s digital life, erased because an algorithm made a mistake.
Digital sovereignty is about making sure this can’t happen to you. It’s the principle that you should control your own digital life, not corporations whose interests may have nothing to do with yours.
You’re Building Your Life on Rented Land
The average person now spends nearly seven hours a day online. We store 500 gigabytes of photos and documents in the cloud. We manage over 160 passwords for personal accounts. Our digital lives have become inseparable from our actual lives.
Yet almost none of this belongs to us.
When you click “buy” on a movie, an ebook, or a video game, you’re not buying anything. You’re renting a license that can be revoked at any time. In March 2024, Ubisoft shut down the servers for a racing game called The Crew, and twelve million players lost access to something they thought they’d purchased. When customers sued, Ubisoft’s lawyers argued they should have known they never really owned the game and “cannot complain now that they were deceived.”
Amazon once deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from people’s Kindles without warning. Microsoft closed its ebook store in 2019, and every book customers had purchased became unreadable. MySpace lost all music uploaded before 2016 during a server migration. These weren’t bugs. This is how the system is designed to work.
The Illusion of Free
You’ve probably heard the saying: if the product is free, you’re the product. But Harvard researcher Shoshana Zuboff puts it more starkly. You’re not even the product, she says. You’re the raw material being extracted.
Every search you make, every photo you upload, every message you send generates data that gets processed, packaged, and sold. The value created from your experiences goes to shareholders. You get the privilege of continuing to use the service until they decide otherwise.
This creates a profound imbalance of power. Tech companies know almost everything about you, but you know almost nothing about them. They can change the rules whenever they want. They can cut off your access with no explanation. And increasingly, algorithms make these decisions without any human being involved at all.
What Digital Sovereignty Actually Looks Like
Digital sovereignty doesn’t mean rejecting technology. It means demanding a different relationship with it.
At its core, it rests on a few key ideas. First, your data belongs to you. You should be able to access it, move it, and delete it. Second, you deserve transparency. You should understand how the systems that affect your life actually work. Third, you’re entitled to due process. Before a company takes action against you, you should have the right to an explanation and an appeal. Fourth, you should be able to leave. If you want to switch services, you should be able to take your data with you.
The European Union has begun enshrining some of these principles in law. Under GDPR, European residents have the right to download their data, to have it deleted, and to transfer it to competing services. But even these protections have limits, and most of the world has far fewer safeguards.
Starting Where You Are
Reclaiming your digital sovereignty doesn’t require becoming a technical expert or abandoning the internet. It starts with awareness and builds through small, concrete steps.
The simplest place to begin is with regular exports. Most major services let you download your data. Google Takeout, for instance, lets you export everything Google knows about you. Make this a monthly habit. Store important files in multiple places. Keep local copies of photos that matter to you.
Beyond backups, consider reducing your dependence on any single company. Use a password manager like Bitwarden instead of storing passwords in your browser. Try a privacy-focused email provider like ProtonMail. Switch your browser from Chrome to Firefox. Change your default search engine to DuckDuckGo. None of these changes are dramatic, but each one gives you a little more control.
The goal isn’t perfection. It’s building a digital life where one company’s decision can’t erase everything you’ve created.
Why This Matters Now
In January 2025, TikTok briefly went dark in the United States, and millions of creators suddenly confronted what it means to build a career on rented land. Some had left stable jobs to become full-time creators. Others had built communities of millions of followers. All of them realized, in an instant, that everything they’d built could vanish based on decisions made in boardrooms and government offices thousands of miles away.
A movement called Stop Killing Games has gathered over 1.4 million signatures demanding that the European Union protect consumers’ right to keep using games they’ve purchased. California recently passed a law requiring companies to disclose that “buy” buttons are actually licenses. These are small signs that people are starting to push back.
The tech giants set out to become utilities, as essential to daily life as electricity and water. They succeeded. The question now is whether we’ll demand the protections that utility customers have always expected: transparency, accountability, and the right to control what is fundamentally ours.
Your digital life is not separate from your real life. It is your real life. And you deserve to own it.