In 2019, Shoshana Zuboff published "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" — a book that gave a name to what millions of people sensed without being able to articulate. The thesis: big tech platforms don't sell advertising. They sell predictions about human behaviour, extracted from constant surveillance of our digital activities. Our clicks, searches, messages, movements — everything becomes raw material for a market of "behavioural futures".
Privacy is not "I have nothing to hide". It is the right to decide what information to share, with whom, and for what purpose. It is the foundation of freedom of thought: if you know you are being watched, you change your behaviour — this is the panoptic effect described by Michel Foucault. Constant surveillance doesn't need to punish: it is enough that the possibility of punishment exists to modify behaviour.
"Privacy by design" is an engineering approach developed by Ann Cavoukian in the 1990s. The idea is that data protection should not be an afterthought, but an architectural principle: systems must be designed from the start to collect the minimum data necessary, protect it with encryption, and give users control. It is not an option: it is a way of thinking about software.
Digital sovereignty goes beyond individual privacy. It is the ability of a community, nation or organisation to control its own digital infrastructure. When a school uses Google Workspace, when a hospital stores data on AWS, when a government communicates via WhatsApp — who really has control? Digital sovereignty asks: can we manage our data with tools we control, on servers we own, under rules we have chosen?
In Europe, initiatives like Gaia-X, NextCloud, and the Data Governance Act seek to build an alternative to dependence on American and Chinese tech giants. In Italy, the Three-Year Plan for IT in Public Administration pushes towards public cloud. These are first steps, but the direction is clear: digital sovereignty is not technological nationalism — it is self-determination.