How to own your data online

"Owning your data" is a slogan most services pay lip service to and most users have no real grip on. A short, practical framework for what it actually requires.

The three properties

Portability

Can you get a complete, useful copy out of the service? A proprietary .json dump that only the same vendor can re-import counts as portability in form but not in practice. A useful export is human-readable, standards-based, and can be loaded into a different tool without losing structure.

Sovereignty

Where does the live copy of your data sit? On the vendor's servers, you depend on their availability, their pricing, and their policies. On infrastructure you control (your own server, a personal data pod you rent, encrypted storage you hold the keys to), the vendor becomes one of many tools you can point at the same store.

Interoperability

Even with portability and sovereignty, you're still stuck if only one tool can read your format. Open standards — W3C, IETF, ontologies that predate the current product cycle — let multiple tools read the same data live, not just at export time.

What this looks like in practice

• Email: own a domain. Your inbox provider becomes a service you can replace; the address is yours.
• Files: a local-first sync layer (Syncthing, rsync) with one or more cloud mirrors. Not a single vendor's drive product as the source of truth.
• Notes: a tool whose storage format is open Markdown or linked data in files you control.
• Bookmarks: linked-data storage in a personal data pod (Solid), with the tool merely reading and writing to it.
• Photos: originals in your own storage, with cloud services consuming them — not the other way around.

The Solid approach

The Solid protocol formalises the three properties above. Your data lives in a pod you control. Apps authenticate via WebID, read and write to the pod, and store nothing themselves. The data format is open linked data, so any Solid-compatible app can read what another wrote.

It's a small ecosystem today, but it's how data ownership actually looks when it's a property of the protocol rather than a marketing claim.

We need a system that gives people control over their own data, lets them choose how it's used, and lets them move between services without losing it.