Prominent Themes in Data Sovereignty Debates Online

The final speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Sidiq Madya, whose interest is in the discussion of the idea of data sovereignty by civil society organisations. Data sovereignty is a spectrum of approaches by nation states to subject data flows to national jurisdictions, and/or the ability or right of individuals to control their personal data and information.

This addresses the misuse and abuse of personal data for surveillance or microtargeting, seeks to mitigate increasing datafication, and seeks alternative models of data governance that limit the free flow of data and encourage local data ownership. There are a large number of values and principles that are frequently mentioned in the context of data sovereignty, and civil society organisations promote a particular set of such values, even though they do not necessarily agree on all of these.

Sidiq’s project uses field and correspondence analysis to assess the positions of these organisations. This assesses their economic (number of staff, headquarters location, UN consultative status) and cosmopolitan capital (from local to global scope), focussing on some 120 organisations which have addressed the topic of data sovereignty in online content, and in doing so have connected with others in the field. These were distinguished into local, glocal, and complex organisations.

Their publishing activities increased considerably from the late 2010s onwards, and key theme clusters in their documents on data sovereignty include human rights, open data, and data localisation. These break down further into a broader range of sub-themes, and such themes are broadly different for local, glocal, and complex organisations; some themes (like open data) cut across a number of organisation types, though.

Dominant actors tend to focus on general, global areas like open data, rights, freedoms, and security issues; while less dominant actors champion open data, data localisation, and Indigenous data and often express more context-specific concerns. This shows a complex relationship between data sovereignty issues, as well as between the civil society actors engaging in such issues.