Privacy from Below: Grassroots, Creative Computing, and Digital Sovereignty in Europe
White Paper Report
This white paper explores the evolving meaning and practice of online privacy at a time when data extraction structures both corporate power and state governance. Moving beyond narrow legal and technical framings, it foregrounds the role of civil society actors, grassroots movements, and creative computing communities in reimagining privacy as a collective and political concern. Through case studies spanning litigation, advocacy, librehosting, privacy-enhancing technologies, and experimental approaches to Artificial Intelligence (AI), the paper demonstrates how bottom-up initiatives open new conceptual and practical horizons for digital rights.
These cases provide situated knowledge that informs our normative stance on the ethical use of technology. By framing privacy as a commons – an infrastructure vital to both individual autonomy and democratic publicness – the paper charts alternative pathways beyond compliance-driven regulation, offering insights and recommendations for policy, technology, and civic practice. Treating privacy as a relational, context-dependent, and socio-technical phenomenon, it situates grassroots practices within broader dynamics of datafication, surveillance capitalism, and the blurring of boundaries between the public and the private.
Privacy from Below: Grassroots, Creative Computing, and Digital Sovereignty in Europe