How the author moved their digital stack to Europe.
“.. ON DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY, AND WHY EUROPEAN CLOUD IS BETTER THAN YOU THINK”
There’s a version of this post that starts with a spreadsheet and ends with a quiet sense of satisfaction. That’s mostly how it went. But underneath the practical exercise of swapping one SaaS tool for another was something that felt more urgent, a growing discomfort with how much of my digital infrastructure sat on servers I didn’t control, in a jurisdiction increasingly prone to unpredictability, operated by companies whose incentives don’t always align with mine.
Digital sovereignty sounds like a buzzword until you think carefully about what it means. It means knowing where your data lives. It means not being one policy change, one acquisition, or one executive’s bad mood away from losing access to tools your business depends on. It means choosing infrastructure based on values, not just convenience.
No, it means owning your data, knowing that “your” data lives on Facebook or Google platforms does not equate to you owning it.
It is also unrealistic for anyone to trace how their data is being leaked across the data broker industry, the most anyone in such a position can realistically achieve now is waiting for their data to be breached by third-parties and attempting to revoke PII afterwards, which is a highly reactionary, anxiety-inducing state with no genuine resolution.
Totally agree that it’s unreasonable to expect anyone to trace how their data is being leaked across data brokers. By design, most of these issues are preventable.
It all come down to incentives, which for many organizations is about increased revenues and obligations to shareholder. In North America, shareholders can even sue the company if they don’t prioritize profits, which has a cascading effect of shaping all types of behaviours for those appointed to making decisions. As an executive of an organizsation, do I prioritize privacy, security, and quality, to the risk of getting into legal issues about the priority of the organization?
In my view, incentives shapes behaviours throughout the organizations and the industry. I think businesses should be profitable (even a non-profit needs some margin/contingency to remain resilient and survive surprises). However, an organization can be profitable and sustainable by focusing on the user it serves and be very clear about its mission, by giving them options, by protecting their privacy and ensure proper data handling. Proton seems to be a great example of this. No solution is 100% hacker-proof, but yet we can continue to aim for continuous improvement to leave something better for tomorrow and for the next generation.
The will of too many individuals is unfortunately aligned with “profit and growth at all cost in the short term”, versus building sustainable and beneficial growth for the longer term. There’s no inherent issue with growth and harvesting - anyone planting seeds expect to harvest something and likely plans for a bit extra for contingency. It’s just the “at all cost” which ultimately will cost most of us in the long run.
Back in focus - how do we change the incentives? For those building privacy-absent solutions today, but also for consumers going along with it - trading short-term gains for future downsides. Corporations are clearly going along with this, but so are so many consumers.
The various incentives will always exist, the meaningful insight comes from encouraging different incentives. I have already figured out how to utilize my own incentives towards my desired ends, but for everyone else, I have no generic AIO solution.