Digital Sovereignty

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What Does Digital Sovereignty Mean?

Digital sovereignty is a key idea in the internet age — the idea that parties must have sovereignty over their own digital data.

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This can be applied on an individual basis or toward nations — the bottom line is that digital sovereignty involves consideration of how data and digital assets are treated.

Techopedia Explains Digital Sovereignty

Digital sovereignty is a big consideration in the privacy world. One commonly cited example of a digital sovereignty principle in play is the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which establishes key requirements for data handling related to European individuals or businesses. The GDPR extends that data sovereignty principal around the world, and requires foreign dealers in European data to get in line.

On an individual level, digital sovereignty has to do with individuals owning their data and controlling its use. Through the encroachment of corporate digital activity, individual user information is too often harvested by corporations and sold for profit. This issue gets to the heart of why digital sovereignty is important.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.