Digital Sovereignty: What it is and why it matters for HCI

Abstract

In recent years, digital sovereignty has become a central term in digital policy discourses. Both authoritarian and democratic states use digital sovereignty as a base for their digital policy, although, the individual interpretation and resulting policy and power balance might be quite different. Given the importance of this term, the HCI community and the users as the core of our research would benefit from taking up the discussion by finding own definitions of human-centred digital sovereignty, contributing to policy discourses, and to strengthening the position of users under non-sovereign conditions. This paper aims to initiate and provoke such discourse within the community by (1) introducing the policy term to HCI and providing an overview of how it is used, (2) arguing for the relevancy of the term, and (3) proposing possible ways forward.