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Digital Sovereignty

How surveillance capitalism, data brokers, and algorithmic profiling actually work — and the practical tools to reclaim control over your digital life. Covers device fingerprinting, social media architecture, legal rights online, facial recognition, and building a sovereign digital presence.

14 Units

30-45 minutes per unit

What You Will Learn

How Surveillance Works

Understand device fingerprinting, behavioral surplus, ad auctions, and the data broker economy — the systems that profile you without consent.

Practical Digital Hygiene

Password managers, 2FA, VPNs, encrypted messaging, browser settings, and app permissions — a real toolkit, not just theory.

Your Legal Rights

COPPA, FERPA, CCPA, GDPR, and the right to be forgotten — what US teens can actually demand of platforms.

All Units

Your Data Double

How a parallel digital identity is constructed from your behavior — device fingerprinting, browser cookies, location data, and the profile you never consented to.

•Explain how device fingerprinting, cookies, and location data combine to create behavioral profiles
•Distinguish between data you consciously share and data that is passively harvested
•Evaluate the accuracy and consequences of data doubles in everyday life

The Surveillance Business Model

How 'free' platforms monetize attention and behavioral data — the economics of behavioral surplus, ad auctions, and why you are the product.

•Explain the economic logic of behavioral surplus and how platforms extract it
•Describe how real-time ad auctions work and who profits from them
•Analyze how platform revenue models shape product design choices

Data Brokers and the Shadow Economy

The $250 billion data broker industry — who buys your data, what they infer, and the secondary markets you'll never see.

•Identify what data brokers are and how they obtain, compile, and sell personal data
•Explain the categories of information data brokers sell and who buys them
•Evaluate the practical and legal limitations of opting out of the data broker system

Social Media Architecture

How feeds, notifications, and infinite scroll are engineered for engagement — persuasion design, dark patterns, and variable-ratio reinforcement.

•Explain how variable-ratio reinforcement schedules are applied in social media design
•Identify specific dark patterns used by platforms to exploit cognitive vulnerabilities
•Analyze how algorithmic feeds prioritize engagement over user wellbeing

The Permanence Problem

Why deletion is an illusion — screenshots, the Wayback Machine, cached pages, and the impossibility of truly removing content from the internet.

•Explain why content deletion from one platform does not remove content from the internet
•Describe how archiving systems, caches, and screenshots preserve content indefinitely
•Evaluate the European 'right to be forgotten' as a policy response and its limitations

Digital Hygiene in Practice

Password managers, 2FA, VPNs, encrypted messaging, browser settings, and app permissions — the practical toolkit for reducing your exposure.

•Configure a password manager and enable two-factor authentication on high-value accounts
•Distinguish between threat models and choose appropriate tools for each
•Evaluate the actual protection provided by VPNs, encrypted messaging, and browser privacy settings

Your Legal Rights Online

COPPA, FERPA, CCPA, GDPR, the right to be forgotten, and what US teens can actually demand of platforms — vs. what the terms of service take away.

•Identify key federal and state laws governing online privacy and what each actually requires
•Analyze how terms of service agreements affect your legal rights under those laws
•Evaluate the gap between legal protections as written and protections as enforced

Facial Recognition and Biometric Surveillance

How facial recognition, gait analysis, and voice profiling work — who deploys them, their error rates, and the communities most affected.

•Explain how facial recognition systems work and why their error rates vary across demographic groups
•Identify where facial recognition and biometric surveillance are currently deployed
•Evaluate the civil liberties implications of biometric identification in public and institutional spaces

School and Workplace Monitoring

EdTech surveillance, employee monitoring software, proctoring tools, and the normalization of being watched — your rights (or lack thereof) in institutions.

•Identify what monitoring schools and employers are legally permitted to conduct
•Evaluate the privacy implications of specific EdTech tools used in school settings
•Analyze how institutional surveillance affects trust, creativity, and autonomy

Algorithmic Profiling and Discrimination

How credit scores, hiring algorithms, predictive policing, and insurance models encode bias — when your data double faces consequences you don't control.

•Explain how algorithmic decision systems can produce discriminatory outcomes even without discriminatory intent
•Identify the domains where algorithmic profiling has documented discriminatory effects
•Evaluate proposed policy responses to algorithmic discrimination and their limitations

The Illusion of Anonymity

Metadata, IP logging, stylometry, and deanonymization — why 'I was anonymous' is almost never true, and what real anonymity requires.

•Define metadata and explain how it can identify individuals even when content is obscured
•Explain how deanonymization attacks work and have been demonstrated in published research
•Evaluate the technical requirements for meaningful anonymity versus pseudonymity

Digital Identity and Mental Health

The gap between curated self and actual self — performance anxiety, comparison spirals, context collapse, and designing an intentional online presence.

•Analyze how social comparison theory operates on platforms designed to maximize social comparison
•Explain the psychological mechanisms behind FOMO, approval-seeking behavior, and performance anxiety in digital spaces
•Design a more intentional approach to online identity based on personal values rather than platform incentives

Building a Sovereign Digital Life

Choosing what to share, where to participate, and what to withhold — personal data strategy as a life skill, not paranoia.

•Develop a personal threat model that identifies realistic risks and appropriate countermeasures
•Create a personal data strategy that reflects deliberate choices rather than platform defaults
•Articulate the difference between privacy as paranoia and privacy as intentional life design

The Future of Digital Identity

Decentralized identity, zero-knowledge proofs, self-sovereign identity standards, and the open question: can technology solve a problem technology created?

•Explain the technical concepts underlying decentralized identity and self-sovereign identity
•Evaluate the promise and limitations of zero-knowledge proofs as a privacy-preserving technology
•Analyze whether technical solutions can adequately address problems that are fundamentally political and economic

Digital Sovereignty. Grades 10-12 elective. 0.5 credit.