The Global Data Sovereignty Welter

The unglamorous nitty-gritty of writing laws and creating agreements constitutes the bulk of what government and NGOs do. Data Sovereignty is one of the topics that fits within this humdrum world, and it must be addressed urgently by national and world bodies.

Overarching issues include: personal data privacy and intrusions to it, the use and misuse of personal data by corporations, and the use and misuse of said data by governments.

Progress is a Good Thing, Right?
Data continues to grow at around 25% per year, thus doubling every three years and growing by a factor of 1,000 every generation. Personal details and all of the lifestyle data being associated with it is part of that incredible flux.

The notion that technological progress equals societal progress has remained dominant since the dawn of the Industrial Age in the 18th century – as progress marches on, we can see for example (as cited in one of the Links of the Week below) that there are still billions of people without the means to conduct online transactions. This will no doubt change.

Yet fears have been raised and much harm has already been done. Downsides range from the annoyance of having to confirm or reject cookies on any initial website encounter (brought about by the GDPR and mirrored in much of the rest of the world), to actual prosecutions, imprisonments, and likely worse from governments who've uncovered the identities of critics or had those identifies handed over to them by large social-media companies.

The Argument for Self-Sovereignty
Within this spectrum lie issues of routine cybertheft and onerous terrorism, identify theft and online imposters, and the sovereignty issues invoked by governments who do not want any of “their” data to cross international borders. Literal data sovereignty also encompasses “self-sovereign identity,” a concept developed by Christopher Allen almost a decade ago, with stated principles that include:

* Users must control their own identity

* Users must have access to their own data

* Users must agree to the use of their identity

* The rights of users must be protected

These pesky principles are anathemic to corporations that wish to scrape whatever data they can and monetize it, and to governments that wish to control people, you know, for their own good.

As an example of the latter point's extensiveness, The Economist Democracy Index identifies dozens of “authoritarian” governments in the world, and more than 100 that are either authoritarian or “flawed.” Allen's self-sovereignty principles have a scant chance of taking root in any of these places in the absence of diplomatic urging, negotiated statements or regulatory persuasion from international bodies.

The developed world, which almost uniformly has “full” or “hybrid” democracies according to The Economist, is at present not the exemplar and beacon for the rest of the world in this area. London in particular and the UK in general has extensive camera networks on a par with China, watching your every step. The US government gives almost untrammeled free rein to corporations sticking their fingers into your online life, and even the EU's allegedly strict General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has its consequential critics.

How Does This Affect Me?
How do these issues filter down to the data center industry? At first blush, we may say “not at all.” Data centers are mere processors and transporters, and their operators are considered such ((thanks to the notorious Section 230). They are considered to be considered in fundamentally the same light as electric utilities, airports, or governmental departments of transportation.

Yet operators should consider what is passing through and being stored in their facilities, particularly if they are also modern media (and social media) companies as well. The GDPR may be strengthened some day, Section 230 may go away, an world organizations and conventions may rise anew to challenge today's personal-data monarchs.