It's Not About Privacy. It's About Dignity.

Imagine you're having a conversation with your spouse at the kitchen table. Now imagine that 10 employees from 10 different companies are sitting quietly in the corner, taking notes. They're not interrupting. They're not hurting you. They're just... there. Writing everything down.
Even if you have nothing to hide, that's weird. It's uncomfortable. It's *undignified*.
And yet, that is a near-perfect description of how most of us communicate every single day.

The Word Nobody Uses
When people talk about the problems with modern technology, they almost always reach for the same word: privacy. It's become the rallying cry for anyone who senses that something is off about the way Big Tech operates. And it's not wrong. Privacy matters. But it's incomplete.
Security matters too. Knowing that your data can't be stolen, that your accounts can't be locked, that the services you depend on can't just vanish one morning because a company changed its terms of service.
But there's a third thing. Something most people feel but almost nobody names: dignity.
We've always believed that sovereignty is the broader category. It's the one that contains privacy and security inside it, alongside something most technologists never think to mention. We view sovereign computing as control over your computing resources such that you can have privacy, security, and dignity. With assurances. Without trust.
Dignity. The word feels almost out of place in a tech conversation. But sit with it for a moment, and it starts to feel like the only word that actually fits.

Confidentiality Is Not Privacy
Part of the confusion comes from companies that have gotten very good at using the word "privacy" to mean something else entirely.
Take Apple. Their marketing leans heavily on privacy as a feature. But there's a distinction worth paying attention to: what Apple actually offers is *confidentiality*. They're promising not to share your information with others. But you are not private from Apple. Your photos, your messages, your health data. Apple can see all of it. You're just trusting them not to look, or at least not to tell anyone what they see.
That's not privacy. That's a promise. And promises can be broken, rewritten, or overruled by a court order.
Real privacy means nobody can see your data because nobody *has* your data. Not because they promised not to look, but because it was never on their servers to begin with.

The Permission Problem
Here's where dignity enters the picture.
Every time you open your photos app and scroll through pictures of your kids, your vacations, your life, there's an invisible exchange happening. Your device is reaching out to a company's servers and, on an API level, asking permission to show you your own memories. The company's server responds: yes, you may view this photo. This time.
It happens instantly. You never notice. But the architecture is clear: you are asking permission to access your own life. And that permission can be revoked. It has been revoked. For people who fell behind on storage payments, violated terms of service they never read, or simply got caught in an automated system's crosshairs.
This isn't a hypothetical privacy breach or a theoretical security vulnerability. It's a structural reality of how cloud computing works. And structural realities don't care about your settings, your preferences, or how carefully you read the fine print.
It is, in every sense of the word, undignified.

What Sovereignty Actually Means
The idea of sovereign computing isn't new. In fact, you could argue that computing was sovereign by default. The first personal computers didn't phone home. They didn't require accounts. Your data lived on your machine because there was nowhere else for it to go.
It took decades of painstaking effort by governments and corporations to build the surveillance infrastructure we now call "the cloud." What we have today, the accounts, the terms of service, the constant quiet monitoring, that's the aberration. Sovereignty is just the original state of computing.
Getting back to it doesn't require rejecting modern technology. It doesn't mean living in a cabin with no internet. It means choosing tools that put you back in the position you were always supposed to be in: the owner of your own devices, your own data, and your own digital life.
It means never having to ask permission to see your own photos.

A Foundation Worth Building On
Privacy and security will always matter. But they're outcomes of something more fundamental. When you actually control your computing, when your server is in your home, running your software, on your terms, privacy and security become natural byproducts. They don't require trust. They don't require a promise from a company that might not exist in 10 years.
And you get something else. Something harder to measure but impossible to ignore once you've felt it.
You get your dignity back.