In 2019 , Mukesh Ambani, declared that Indian data has to controlled by Indians . It was part of a growing discourse about data sovereignty. His Reliance Big Tech is India’s Big Tech. It appears that he wanted to control Indian data and use it to benefit his corporation ( Big Business) . But this data control is only going to reproduce and mirror what global players are doing locally. It does not mean that it si the people of India who would have sovereignty over the data they produce. They will continue to be proletarianized and treated as unpaid workers as is the case with people all over the world. Ambani supports Indian Government’s effort to store and govern Indian data locally. Already in 2018, Indian National Bank had announced rules to restrict financial data within national borders. This had angered global corporations as their access to this data was stopped. Consequent discourse that followed appeared to guard data sovereignty against its colonization by the global corporations. But we cannot accept statist data ownership of its subjects. What we need is a state that protects data of its citizens. The citizen who produce data have the right to participate in data governance through the demands of justice, transparency and accountability.
The term data sovereignty is an empty signifier (Ernesto Laclou). It simply hides the teeth that bite data producing citizens. This means in place of global corporations, it opens doors for local Big Business to use data and benefit. This means citizens producing data are then exploited by their very own. Hence, the term data sovereignty is thought to be neocolonial. We need an alternative imagination of data sovereignty. Here I try an explore the principles of open data, and alliance between anti-surveillance and social justice movements. I depend on the work of Sagnik Dutta and Suruchi Mazumdar. What we can clearly notice is that data sovereignty is viewed as a top-down process but such an approach is as exploitative and is mirroring the one that is occurring at level of global Big Tech and Big Business. Perhaps, true data sovereignty comes through bottom-up approach. Hence, we have to examine the question of agency with respect to data, data knowledge, data participation , data accountability and data transparency.
We are all data subjects. The relations of Indian state with Big Data giants is complex. One may call it as a hybrid alliance. The Big Techs allied to Big Data are using colonial extractivist methods , abstract quantification and high powered computing. We seem to be facing a new form of colonialism. It is christened as AI Empire by Tacheva and Ramasubramaniam. The AI Empire indulges into context specific datafication and use the gathered data to manipulate the very data subject who had produced the data to benefit Big Business and Big Politics. Hence, the notion of data sovereignty was developed to declare the state’s supreme authority over data pertaining to its population within its boundaries. It meant that data produced within a nation satate’s territorial limits is bound by its rules and laws.
Nations are strongly protecting their own sensitive data after the wiki-leak scandal. Data safety, therefore, came to be linked to national security . Sovereignty, is an European concept. It was absorbed by the new state’s that emerged out of colonization along with the notions of nation, nationalism, state and state formation. This is why sovereignty is not positive term. It is primarily a negative term. It consists mainly with the power of the state to dispossess its citizens. Hence, concept of data sovereignty is also tied to this negative notion and is deeply state-centric. Thus, data sovereignty became the right of a nation to collect, store and manage data produced by its citizens. Within this understanding , we also have digital sovereignty which in state power over data, software, standards and protocols, hardware, services and infrastructures that constitute the domain of the digital.
There is need to move away from this state-centric notion of data sovereignty to reclaim the right of the marginalized data producing citizens. This leads us to autonomous community ownerships of data produced by the people. We can find this efforts to reclaim ownership over data in Latin America and New Zealand. In New Zealand, we can trace the notion of indigenous sovereignty. These efforts demonstrate how data produced by their people can be regulated and put to use by the people themselves. We also have feminists or trans-hacker cooperatives that control and regulate data. Thus, for instance, we have Brazil based Maria-Lab which follow feminist principles in technological spaces. Similarly we have Alternative Liberal Trans, funded by Trans people in Argentina. There are several others like organization working for digital rights Datysoc in Uruguay, Hiperderecho in Peru, InternetLab in Brazil. This non-state-centric efforts directed towards data protection and its use are important because they are sympathetic to the datafied victims like migrant, asylum seekers , and refugees who are sometimes datafied for persecution.
Unfortunately, Indian scholarship seems to be reeling under state-centric notion of data sovereignty. This has been used by the Indian state to claim its power over data. But the Indian State also seems to be governed by pragmatism as it allowed Indian Big Tech Jio to align with the investment of 5.7 million dollars from Meta as well as the Union Health Ministry tied up with Google to launch digital health ID which promises health access and personal health records on google wallet. Hence, data sovereignty is a contested terrain in India. We do have data activists and civil society contesting the very notion of data sovereignty in our country. This means we have the challenge to contest data universalism and stay sensitive to heterogeneity, cultural specificities, diverse contexts as well as intimacy and privacy of individuals. We do have the imperative to join hands to interrogate, challenge and dismantle the hegemonic power of the nation-state and Big Tech when they serves Big Business and Big Politics by polling our data into the domain of Big Data.
