Your “account” isn’t you. It’s a rented identity.
One TOS change, one ban, one merger, and your access is gone.
Digital sovereignty means owning your identity instead of borrowing it.
Centralised Logins Are a Single Point of Failure
Convenience logins — “Sign in with Google/Facebook/Apple” — put your whole online life behind one door:
- Lose access to that provider and you lose everything linked to it
- They track where you sign in; data is the price
- You have no leverage when policies shift
Convenience is fine, until it isn’t.
Custom Domains and Email
The easiest form of self-owned identity:
- Register your own domain and use it for email
- You can migrate providers without changing your address
- Less likely to be held hostage by any single company
It’s boring, but it’s control.
Decentralised Identity Protocols
Emerging systems like WebAuthn, IndieAuth or decentralised identifiers aim to:
- Let you prove “you are you” without a single corporate gatekeeper
- Use cryptographic keys you control
- Keep logins portable across services
They’re imperfect and early, but worth watching.
Keep Credentials Independent
Don’t tie everything to one basket:
- Separate personal and work identities
- Avoid using the same provider for login, hosting, and communication
- Maintain offline backups of recovery keys and 2FA tokens
Redundancy applies to identity too.
Test Your Exits
An exit plan matters:
- Can you recover your accounts without the provider?
- Do you have alternate contact addresses?
- Do you control the root credentials (domain, keys)?
Identity sovereignty means having an escape route before you need one.
You Are Not Your Account
Your online self should not depend on a handful of companies.
Own the keys, own the name, own the means to prove you’re you.
That’s not paranoia. It’s basic resilience in a fragile system.