Curriculum Map

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

Early Units (Foundation)

Building Skills

Advanced Concepts

Capstone/Synthesis

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.

3-4 days

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.

3-4 days

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.

3-4 days

Social Media Architecture

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

3-4 days

The Permanence Problem

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

3-4 days

Digital Hygiene in Practice

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

3-4 days

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.

3-4 days

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.

3-4 days

School and Workplace Monitoring

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

3-4 days

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.

3-4 days

The Illusion of Anonymity

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

3-4 days

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.

3-4 days

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.

3-4 days

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?

3-4 days

Learning Progression

This course is designed to be taken sequentially. Earlier units establish foundational concepts that later units build upon. While you can explore units in any order, following the numbered sequence provides the most coherent learning experience.