Data sovereignty - some personal musings for Canada Day
- Jenn Roberts
- Jun 30
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 30
Tomorrow is Canada Day, a day for reflection and contemplation of sovereignty for those of us who are Canadian and for Artefactual, a Canadian company. How do we think of sovereignty in a country built on land where nations existed long before European settlers arrived and as a nation now facing new economic and trade threats from its closest neighbour? How can we be BOTH proud of the privileges Canadians have and of our national identity AND yet recognize that national sovereignty often does not align with cross-border collaboration and international law? At Artefactual, we think a lot about data sovereignty and the power that resides in information, records, and cultural memory.
Broadly speaking, data sovereignty refers to a group or individual’s right to control and maintain their own data, which includes the collection, storage, transmission, and interpretation of data.
At the national level, data sovereignty means that data generated within a country’s borders is governed by that nation’s laws and regulatory frameworks. With the rise of cloud computing and an increasing reliance on the services of transnational corporations to manage both personal and organizational data (and often governmental data as well), many countries have passed various laws or regulations around the control and storage of data, which all reflect measures of data sovereignty.
But the word sovereign still comes with, for me, complicated feelings. It feels…. kingly and I am not a big fan of hereditary power (which yes, is confusing, in a constitutional monarchy). When we talk about data sovereignty in the context of software and being a commercial software company that designs software to support data sovereignty requirements, what are we really talking about?
By choosing to work with Artefactual, you are working with a Canadian company. But your data, the thing that you should focus on, does not have to be stored on Canadian soil (although it can be). The idea of an Information Package that is self-describing and system agnostic - containing all the metadata needed to understand the content as well as the content itself AND which can be stored anywhere so that you are not dependent on the system that created it - is the very foundation on which we approach our work. Open source software is a self guaranteeing promise - you don’t need to place your trust in a vendor, even though one of Artefactual’s key values is that we strive to be trustworthy. We want to make sure that control and responsibility for your data can remain in your hands, not ours.
That’s where the rubber really hits the road, in my opinion. If there is a light to hold up during these turbulent times, it’s realising that information is still power. And we want to empower and inform our clients. When you assert your right to retain control over your information, you thwart the technocrats and others who want to own, control, access, use and reuse data to which they have no right. When I talk about data and compute sovereignty at Artefactual, I am trying to talk about how we can be a partner for institutions that want to remain in control of their data.
Tomorrow is Canada’s 158th birthday. In 1867 Canada was granted a large measure of control over its domestic affairs from the British Crown. But Canada didn’t even achieve its own status as a fully sovereign nation until 1982 when the Constitution was patriated and the Canadian Charter came into being. Like all other forms of sovereignty, data sovereignty relates to who has the power. And as technology continues to evolve, debates about data sovereignty are evolving into broader discussions on digital sovereignty and call into question many traditional archival practices. July 1st, a day for contemplating history, nationalism, power, and cultural memory. That’s actually my kind of holiday.
Jenn Roberts, Systems Archivist
Canadian by birth, British by father, international humanist by choice
