Digital Sovereignty is in the list of topics of Germany’s Digital Strategy 2025 … however, more implementation details are required.

Update 2016-06-08: Digital Sovereignty comes in focus on de.digital (in German), see also "Digital Sovereignty - Participate! Contribute!"

In the course of this week (CW 12, 2016), my daily newspaper contained a little flyer summarizing the digital strategy till 2025 of the German Government. 10 key steps such as Gigabit fiber optics networks, new regulation framework, location Germany 4.0, R&D, education etc. are covered. Data security and data sovereignty are addressed. A 4-page flyer is available for download.

The wording „Data security and data sovereignty are important pillars of our democracy and at the same time required for acceptance and success of a data driven economy.“ („Datensicherheit und Datensouveränität sind wichtige Grundpfeiler unserer Demokratie und zugleich Voraussetzung für die Akzeptanz und den Erfolg einer datengetriebenen Ökonomie.“) shows that Data Sovereignty is critical as well as for a functioning democracy as for economic development. Unfortunately, the focus is quickly moved to the economic use of data and securing them against espionage. Sovereignty is not further refined and broken down into specific sub-goals. The text very generally talks about “reconciliation of consumer and business interests”. Data shall be made available for business use in pseudonymized (why not anonymized?) form. One would have liked to see some more wording on the implementation of data sovereignty. For example, how unacceptable opt-in rules in today's apps should be improved/replaced for better consumer awareness. The decentralized processing of anonymized data is ignored as an economic value and differentiation factor of a German or European data security strategy.

The web site can nevertheless be recommended as a useful reference to potentially interesting contacts and organizations.