Digital sovereignty
Digital sovereignty means being able to use digital services on your own terms: knowing where data is, who has access, and being able to switch provider.
What is digital sovereignty?
Digital sovereignty describes the ability to act on your own terms in the digital world. For individuals it means understanding services, deciding about your own data and not depending on a single provider. For states and companies it is about being able to control important technology – data centres, software, networks – themselves, or at least choose it freely. In Europe the term is often linked to the wish for home-grown alternatives to non-European platforms.
How to recognise it
Important questions are: where are the servers, and which law applies there? Who operates the service, and who can technically access data? Can you export your own data in a common format and take it to another provider? Open standards and open-source software make switching and verification easier. In the EU, rules such as the General Data Protection Regulation strengthen users' rights, for example to access, erasure and data portability.
Limits in everyday life
Complete independence is rare. Almost every service uses building blocks from other companies, for example for push notifications on the smartphone, for payments or for app distribution. What matters is that a provider says openly which services are involved and that you have alternatives. A server location in Europe on its own also says nothing about how carefully data is handled.
On Friendstime
Friendstime is developed and operated in Germany; the servers are located in Frankfurt am Main and Nuremberg. You can download your profile, your posts and your comments as a JSON file, and you can delete your account yourself. Not everything is in its own hands: push notifications are delivered by Google (Firebase), and payments are handled by the respective payment providers.
Frequently asked questions
Is digital sovereignty the same as data protection?
No. Data protection governs how personal data may be handled. Digital sovereignty is broader and asks who controls the technology and whether you can choose and switch freely.
What can I do myself?
Choose services deliberately, read up on where they are operated, export your data regularly and use open formats where possible. That keeps you flexible if you want to switch provider.
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