Data sovereignty asks a question that feels simple until you sit with it: was the consent you gave to share your data actually informed? You joined social media for your own reasons, and somewhere along the way those posts became something else entirely. Tourists visiting the US for FIFA or the Olympics may now face a requirement to hand over five years of social media history at the border, and that use was never part of any agreement you thought you were making.

The people who invented the web itself, Tim Berners-Lee and Jaron Lanier among them, have spent years building a different model called data pods, where your information lives under your control rather than on someone else’s servers. You decide who gets access, for how long, and you can walk away with everything when you’re done. Getting there means wrestling a $2 trillion industry away from an arrangement that works beautifully in its favor, and it also means reckoning with the fact that about a third of the web’s original pages have already vanished because storing unused data costs money nobody wants to spend.

None of this is abstract once you trace the line from your phone number to a data broker to a robocall at dinnertime. That line is shorter than you’d like, and Greg’s whole point is that it only stays that short because most of us have quietly decided there’s nothing to be done about it.

Topics:data sovereignty, data pods, informed consent, data brokers, social media privacy

GUEST:Greg Fish | cyberpunksurvivalguide.com

Originally aired on2026-02-18