What is personal digital sovereignty?
Personal digital sovereignty means keeping control of your digital life: your data, your tools, your access. You decide who can read what, you can switch tools without losing anything, and no decision made abroad can cut off your email overnight.
A matter for governments? Not only.
Digital sovereignty gets discussed for governments: sovereign clouds, health data, public contracts. It gets discussed for companies. What about you? Your emails, your photos, your passwords, your trips and your conversations run through a handful of services, almost all of them American. The sovereignty question applies at your scale too.
It comes down to three simple questions. Who holds my data? Who can cut off my access? And if I want to leave, can I take everything with me?
Good news: this is neither an activist project nor an engineering job. No need for a server in your living room. It means choosing, service by service, tools you could leave tomorrow with your data under your arm. That freedom to leave changes everything, even if you never leave.
The three dependencies that stack up
Losing sovereignty is not a vague feeling. It can be measured on three levels, and the three add up.
The advertising profile
Every search, every trip, every video feeds a profile built to sell your attention. You never see it, but it decides which ads, prices and content you get shown.
The single point of failure
One account often holds everything: email, photos, passwords, calendar, phone. One hack, one lockout or one algorithmic mistake, and your entire digital life shuts down at once.
The jurisdiction
Your data follows the law of your provider's country, not yours. For Google, Apple, Microsoft or Meta, that means US law: the Cloud Act lets US authorities access it, even when the servers sit in Europe.
What if the United States were no longer an ally?
Let's ask the uncomfortable question. Not out of a taste for doom: because your emails, your family photos, your passwords and your itineraries depend on companies bound by US law. If Washington became less friendly, what would happen? Nothing needs inventing: the law already exists, and so do the precedents.
The law is already written
The Cloud Act, signed on March 23, 2018, lets US authorities demand from an American provider the data of its customers, wherever the servers are. Your emails hosted in Dublin or Frankfurt change nothing: the company is American, so it must comply. Meanwhile, Section 702 of FISA, renewed in April 2024, organizes the surveillance of non-Americans' communications. You are a non-American.
Europe knows it. On July 16, 2020, the EU Court of Justice struck down the Privacy Shield, the agreement covering data transfers to the United States, precisely because of that surveillance. Its replacement, adopted on July 10, 2023, rests on a single US presidential executive order, revocable at any time. And in January 2025, the White House dismissed three members of the oversight board meant to guarantee that agreement, leaving it without a quorum. The legal framework protecting your data across the Atlantic hangs on one signature.
The precedents exist
Services cut off overnight by political decision? It has already happened. On May 16, 2019, Washington put Huawei on its trade blacklist. Three days later, Google suspended the manufacturer's access to Android and its apps: millions of phones lost their updates, without notice. In July 2019, GitHub restricted the accounts of developers based in Iran, Syria and Crimea to comply with US sanctions. In May 2025, the Associated Press revealed that the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, sanctioned by Washington three months earlier, had lost access to his work email hosted by Microsoft.
An international magistrate cut off from his email by a foreign executive order. Remember that precedent: the target was not a state or an army, but one man's mailbox.
Now, transpose
In France, Google handles 88% of online searches, Chrome runs two browsers out of three and Android two smartphones out of three (StatCounter, June 2026). In total, the Google brand reaches 99% of French internet users every month (Médiamétrie, May 2026). If a future US administration used that access as leverage in a trade negotiation or a diplomatic crisis, what would France do? And you, what would you do if your account were degraded, taxed or suspended?
Take stock: your twenty years of emails, your children's photos, the passwords to all your other accounts, your movements. Everything depends on one account, and that account obeys a law that is not yours.
I am not predicting anything. The United States remains an ally, and this scenario is only a scenario. What is not a hypothesis is the current state of affairs: a massive, documented dependency with no plan B. Personal digital sovereignty starts with that clarity.
What does it look like in practice?
Dependency does not have a single face. The diagnostic on this site sorts respondents into six profiles, from most exposed to most autonomous. You will probably recognize yourself in one of them.
The Happy Googler
Everything runs through Google, simple and smooth. The dependency is complete, but this is the profile with the most to gain.
The Default User
Preinstalled tools, no real decision. A few conscious choices would be enough to take back control.
The Walled-Garden Resident
No Google, but another closed ecosystem, Apple or Microsoft. The comfort is real, and so is the dependency.
The Clear-Eyed Googler
Google is still central, but the awareness is there and the first steps are done.
The Independence Builder
The choices that matter are already made. A few residual dependencies remain.
The Sovereign
Independent tools, good habits, sometimes self-hosting. The hardest part is done.
24 questions, 5 minutes, free and no sign-up.
The state of play, in numbers
This site documents French dependency with dated, sourced and freely quotable data.
Across the first 111 respondents to the diagnostic, the average digital independence score is 47 out of 100. The detail, service by service, is published in the barometer.
See the barometerHow do you take it back?
No big bang. You do not undo fifteen years of habits in a weekend, and you do not need to. What works is one service at a time, starting with the simplest, the browser or the search engine. Email comes next: an afternoon to set up, then a few weeks of quiet transition. Each step makes the next one easier.
Where to start?
You now know what is at stake. The book takes you all the way: the complete method to replace each service, step by step, and the story of what I did myself.
Forthcoming 22/10/2026 from Éditions Eyrolles
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between digital sovereignty and privacy?
Privacy is one part of the picture: who can read your data. Sovereignty adds two questions: who can cut off your access, and can you leave with your data. You can have decent privacy and zero sovereignty, for instance inside a closed ecosystem that protects your data but keeps you in.
Do you have to quit everything to be sovereign?
No. Sovereignty is a dial, not an absolute. Keeping a Google service knowingly is a legitimate choice; enduring it without knowing is not one. Every service you take back, even a single one, reduces your exposure and widens your room for maneuver.
Do European alternatives really protect against the Cloud Act?
On jurisdiction, yes: the Cloud Act only applies to American providers. A Swiss company like Proton or a German one like Tuta is not subject to it. No service escapes its own courts, however. The real protection is called end-to-end encryption: a provider cannot hand over what it cannot read.
Do you need to be technical to reclaim your digital sovereignty?
No. If you can install an app, you have the level. Mainstream alternatives install in a few minutes, and the genuinely technical projects, like changing your phone's operating system, remain optional.
Where do you start, concretely?
With an assessment: the free diagnostic on this site measures your dependency in 24 questions and hands you a personalized action plan. Then replace the simplest thing: the search engine or the browser, the work of an evening. Email comes later; it is the project that pays off the most. And to be guided all the way through, the complete step-by-step for each migration is in Vivre sans Google.