Becoming Data Self-Sovereign

Posted on 14th Apr 2022

When I was younger I hosted my first service, Email. Email was the most important thing to me. You could take away MySpace, chatrooms and my internet connection, but you better never take my email. Today, email is still an important service in my life. Although it’s role has shifted over the years as instant messaging, social media, and other services have taken over, email is still a core component of my everyday life.

I never wanted to give someone else control over my email. I hosted it myself. And the biggest reason why was because *I* was the only man for the job. I wanted to know I always had control over it. No one could touch it but me. No one could one day say “We’ll just take his email away from him because of [reasons]”. As long as my server was running so was my email. No one could snoop on my emails, or use it for ads. I could effectively say anything I wanted to say.

In today's world, people give away their control. They hand it over to the Facebooks and the Twitters of the world. Their email is hosted by 3rd parties who likely use computer automation to read every line of email sent and received and sell it to ad companies for ad revenue. We give up a lot of our freedoms because at any time these companies can decide to remove anything they do not like. Emails, social media posts, or even access to their services completely. It is fully up to the whims of the platform owner(s). When computers got started, most people hosted their own services. Of course, this predated the internet. BBS services (known as bulletin Boards) were all the rage as it helped people connect to others in their local towns and cities. Later, FidoNET became the first BBS-enabled service to allow users to send messages and emails to people all over the world, regardless of what BBS they were connected to. Most of the time, however, everyday people hosted services for themselves. When the internet came along it was harder to host your own services as it required an always connected machine in order to be accessible. Prior to that, people would just have a phone line attached to a modem and services were offered when users dialed into it. Because of this change, it was hard for normal, everyday people to host the same services on the internet like they did before. They started allowing “hosting providers” to help host web sites, email, and other content so everyone on the internet could see. But eventually high-speed access became the norm for most households and because these high-speed access services are offered as an always-on solution, normal everyday people can once again, host their own services. This is called Self-Hosting.

Self-Hosting is part of the data self-sovereign process. Instead of allowing a company to host your data for you, you do it yourself. This gives you back control. If Facebook doesn’t like something you say, they can choose to shut you down by deleting your post or even suspending your account. But if you are hosting your own social network (which isn’t really that hard to set up. I’ll be talking about this in a later article) no one can suspend your account or delete your post. Because you are in control.

Data Self-sovereignty is, in my opinion, the right of anyone. And because of Free Open-Source Software (FOSS), it is possible for the normal, everyday person to run their own services and become data self-sovereign. That being said, not everyone will choose to be Data Self-sovereign. This can be for many reasons. Perhaps they are too dependent on Facebook or Twitter to leave the platform, or they simply do not understand why it’s so important, just to name a few. But those who choose to follow the path of data self-sovereignty will likely find themselves free to do the things they want to do without having to follow political laws that companies tend to enforce or be in fear of suspension over something that the platform owners disagree with.

Keep in mind that, should you choose the data self-sovereignty route, it is not something you just decide on a whim. It’s a journey. Not one that will be completed in a day (Rome wasn’t built in a day either). It’s also something that will require you to rethink what you do online, and how you do it. Whether it be as simple as your social media, or email, or even how you purchase things online (cryptocurrency) and talk to people over chat, video and audio.

Becoming data self-sovereign is a freeing experience. It allows you to regain control and helps you to be self-sufficient online. I will have more articles on this topic coming soon so keep checking back for more!