In today’s world, it often feels like Big Tech knows everything about us. Every search, email, and message is tracked, analyzed, and monetized for targeted ads or algorithmic purposes.

For years, I accepted this as a fair trade for convenience. I relied heavily on Google’s suite (Mail, Calendar, Docs, and Maps) to manage both my professional and personal life. My inbox stayed clean, travel plans were automatically added to my calendar, and my Android phone reminded me when to leave for meetings. These tools genuinely helped me stay organized amidst a demanding schedule.

As a digital researcher and educator, I not only used these tools but also taught others to do the same. Efficiency often took priority over examining the underlying systems that made it all work. The frictionless experience felt like progress.

Yet I’ve always bristled at the popular sayings: “If the product is free, then you are the payment,” or “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” Today, those phrases hit differently. The convenience that once felt harmless now seems costly. What we trade away in exchange for ease of use is our privacy, personal data, communications, and creative work. All of which can be quietly harvested and exploited by powerful companies.

So what can we do about it? The answer lies in digital sovereignty.

At its core, digital sovereignty means reclaiming control over your digital footprint. It’s the idea that you’re not merely a product for others to exploit, but an active participant in shaping your online life. By choosing privacy‑focused tools and intentional digital habits, we can reclaim ownership of our data, our devices, and our digital selves.

The Big Tech Data Grab

Big Tech companies like Google and Meta offer powerful “free” tools. Tools and platforms that we use every day, like Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Facebook. But those services are funded by our data. Their real business model is collecting information about what we do, think, and create.

1. Email and Messages Until recently, Google scanned free Gmail accounts to personalize ads. The company says it stopped in 2017, but still analyzes emails for spam filtering and other features. Even in “incognito” mode, Google was caught tracking searches and locations. This type of hidden data collection is exactly what digital sovereignty tries to prevent.

2. Advertising Profiles Every search, click, or post builds a detailed profile of you. Your interests, habits, and even moods. These profiles feed targeted advertising and train new AI systems. For instance, Google’s Gemini AI can access content from your emails and files to personalize responses. By switching to privacy‑focused tools, you disrupt that continuous data feedback loop.

3. Political and AI Manipulation Data collection doesn’t just sell ads. It shapes opinions. The Cambridge Analytica scandal demonstrated how personal information can be leveraged to influence elections. More recently, AI systems have been trained on millions of online texts and books, sometimes without the authors’ consent. These examples reveal significant flaws in the protection of digital information and underscore the importance of maintaining control over our own content.

In short, when a service is free, you’re often the product. Every click and scroll helps sustain a data‑driven system built on surveillance. It became clear that this convenience has a price. Realizing this prompted me to step back and reconsider the tools I rely on, as well as the kind of digital footprint I want to leave behind.

What Is Digital Sovereignty?

Put simply, digital sovereignty means having control over your own digital life. Your data, devices, and tools. It’s the idea that you, not a corporation or government, decide what happens to your information. As the World Economic Forum describes it, it’s about control over “the data, hardware, and software that you rely on and create.”

For individuals, digital sovereignty is about using technology that respects your privacy and gives you ownership of your data. This can look like:

• Encrypting your messages so only you and your recipient can read them.
• Choosing email, cloud, or chat services that don’t log or sell your information.
• Storing data in countries with strong privacy protections (for example, Proton Mail’s servers in Switzerland).
• Giving explicit consent for any data collection, rather than being tracked by default.

In practice, digital sovereignty means independence from Big Tech’s walled gardens. It’s about building a digital life on your own terms. Deciding what to share, what to protect, and which tools to trust. Just as nations are realizing the need to guard their technological independence, individuals can do the same by making more conscious choices about the tools and platforms they use.

Why Switch to Privacy-Friendly Tools

Understanding the problem helps explain why tools like Proton Mail and Signal are worth using. They give you many of the same features as Big Tech platforms, but without turning your data into a product.

Proton Mail: Private Email Without the Snooping. Proton Mail encrypts your inbox so that only you and your recipient can read your messages; even Proton cannot decrypt them, thanks to its zero-access design. Messages between Proton users are protected automatically, and you can add passwords to emails sent to non‑Proton addresses, making strong encryption easy to use. Because Proton is based in Switzerland, it benefits from strict privacy laws and cannot be compelled to engage in bulk surveillance or hand over data to foreign agencies on demand. It is funded by subscriptions rather than ads, so it has no incentive to scan your mailbox for targeting or sell your information.​

Signal: Private Messaging That Just Works. Signal brings the same philosophy to chat, using end‑to‑end encryption for texts, calls, group chats, and media so only participants can see or hear them. The app collects very little metadata beyond a phone number, and it has no ads, tracking pixels, or data‑hungry integrations. Signal is open‑source and run by a nonprofit foundation, which aligns its mission with protecting users rather than monetizing them.​

In short, Proton Mail and Signal handle email and messaging in a way that keeps your content and metadata locked down while staying simple to use, turning digital sovereignty from an abstract idea into an everyday practice.

Practicing Digital Sovereignty

So if Big Tech’s model depends on our data, what does it look like to opt out? Even just a little bit?

• Use end‑to‑end encrypted tools for email, chat, and files so only you and your contacts can read the content.
• Prefer services that minimize logging and cannot be forced into bulk surveillance, rather than those that monetize detailed behavioral profiles.
• Store your data with providers in countries that have strong privacy laws and tighter limits on bulk surveillance and data retention.
• Regularly review and limit permissions, such as ad tracking, AI training, and cross-app tracking, instead of accepting the defaults.
• Avoid putting everything (mail, docs, photos, identity) under a single company’s account, which concentrates far too much power over your “digital destiny.”

These steps are about regaining control, not perfection. Every service you move to a more private alternative is one less stream of data feeding surveillance‑driven business models.​

Why It All Matters

This isn’t just tech talk. It’s about what it feels like to live, work, and connect in a world where so much of life passes through a screen. When you start choosing your own tools, rather than accepting whatever Big Tech hands you, you begin to protect something bigger than an inbox setting: your privacy, your autonomy, your sense of who is really in control.

Over time, it becomes clear that our data truly belongs to us. Every message sent to a partner, every photo shared with family, carries a piece of a life that should belong to you first, not to an ad network or training dataset. Encryption and privacy‑focused tools are simply ways of making that belief real, so that only the people you intend can see what you share.

The headlines have helped drive this home. Lawsuits over hidden tracking and unauthorized AI training make it harder to pretend that handing everything to a few large platforms is harmless. Each new case is a reminder that if we don’t set boundaries for our data, those decisions will be made for us, and not always in our favor.

The good news is that reclaiming some control is no longer a niche, technical project. Tools like Proton Mail and Signal now work out of the box, encrypting by default and quietly limiting what they know about you. Using them feels less like “locking things down” and more like a normal, everyday way of talking and working. Just without the constant sense of being watched.

And small changes really do add up. Maybe one friend follows you to Signal, or a colleague replies to your new Proton address, and a conversation opens about why you switched. As more people take those steps, companies and policymakers feel pressure to take privacy seriously, and the culture around data shifts incrementally.

Digital rights are increasingly treated as part of basic human rights, which means control over your “digital destiny” is a civic question as much as a technical one. Every time you choose an encrypted app, a privacy‑respecting service, or a less convenient but more respectful option, you’re doing more than protecting yourself. You’re helping push the balance of power, however slightly, back toward ordinary users.

In the upcoming posts in this series, the focus will shift to specific tools, such as Signal and Proton, with concrete steps for integrating them into a digital life that feels more like it belongs to you.

Cover Photo by Logan Voss on Unsplash