Data sovereignty

Data sovereignty means that data generated within a country’s borders is governed by that nation’s laws and regulatory frameworks; this ensures local control over data access, storage, and usage. In other words, a country is able to control and access the data that is generated in its territories. .An example of a nation's data sovereignty policy would be Australia’s Privacy Act 1988, which established the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) that regulate the handling of personal information by government agencies and private sector organizations. The APP contains 13 principles for how all personal or organizational data in Australia is meant to be kept. For many countries, the issue of data sovereignty is presented as an issue of national security with concerns over being able to protect citizens' personal data. Data can be used to help improve medical care, reinforce national security as well as have a positive impact on many economic and social infrastructures but may also be used for identity theft and other data related attacks.

The concept of data sovereignty is closely linked with data security, cloud computing, network sovereignty, and technological sovereignty. Unlike technological sovereignty, which is vaguely defined and can be used as an umbrella term in policymaking, data sovereignty is specifically concerned with questions surrounding the data itself. The issue of managing data sovereignty can be considered more complex when introducing the idea of cloud computing, where data can be accessed globally; meaning organizations and companies must comply with multiple nations data laws. Data sovereignty is also associated with data localization, the requirement that data be stored within a specified region, and data residency, the actual location in which the data is stored, such as cloud servers.

Data sovereignty as the idea that data is subject to the laws and governance structures within one nation, is usually discussed in one of two ways: in relation to Indigenous groups and Indigenous autonomy from post-colonial states, or in relation to transnational data flow. With the rise of cloud computing, many countries have passed various laws around the control and storage of data, which all reflect measures of data sovereignty. More than 100 countries have some form of data sovereignty laws in place. With self-sovereign identity (SSI), the individual identity holders can fully create and control their credentials, although a nation can still issue a digital identity in that paradigm.