Who Owns Your Tools?

There is a server farm in Oregon that knows what your children watch before they fall asleep. It knows your wife's search history, your father's medical questions, the arguments you had last March. It doesn't know your name. It doesn't need to.

That server farm belongs to someone who would not invite you to dinner. And it runs the tools you call yours.

This is the problem at the center of modern American life. The software that organizes our households, educates our children, runs our businesses, and stores our memories belongs to companies that don't share our values, don't answer to us, and profit by treating us as the product rather than the customer.

We accepted it gradually. The convenience was real. Gmail is faster than a mail server you have to maintain. Google Photos is easier than organizing your own backup. Facebook connects you to people you actually know. Each trade felt small in isolation. Together, they amounted to surrendering the infrastructure of daily life to strangers.

Technology sovereignty is the project of taking it back.

The term sounds bureaucratic. Forget it. What we're actually talking about is something the American tradition understands well: you should own your tools, your land, your data. The man who builds a house on rented land is at the mercy of his landlord. The family whose photos live on someone else's server is one terms-of-service update away from losing them. The small business whose customer relationships are filtered through a platform doesn't own those relationships at all.

This isn't paranoia. It's the basic accounting of who controls what.

A September 2024 FTC staff report found that major social media companies had engaged in what it called "vast surveillance of users," collecting data on what people read, where they went, their health conditions, income level, and religious beliefs, primarily to power behavioral advertising systems (FTC, 2024). Google and Meta, whose combined advertising revenue exceeded $425 billion in 2024, built those businesses by harvesting behavioral data from every click, search, and scroll (Alphabet Inc., 2025; Meta Platforms, 2025). Your attention was inventory. Your habits were product. Your family's browsing history was raw material.

Cambridge Analytica made it vivid. Eighty-seven million Facebook profiles, harvested without meaningful consent through a third-party quiz app, were used to build psychological targeting models for political campaigns (CNBC, 2018). Most people were shocked. They shouldn't have been. The model was always extractive.

The question isn't whether this has been going on. It has. The question is what to do about it.

Some people want regulation. They have been waiting for that for twenty years. The regulatory path has its place, but it is slow, adversarial, and it concedes the premise that these companies should exist in their current form. It asks permission to have your own life. And even effective regulation, like the FTC's $5 billion settlement with Facebook in 2019, did not change the underlying business model (FTC, 2019).

There is another approach. Build alternatives. Use them. Support the people building them.

Americans are already doing this. The self-hosting movement, once the domain of Linux enthusiasts with spare servers in their basements, has gone mainstream. Tools like Nextcloud let a family run their own cloud storage, calendar, and document editing without feeding a single byte to Microsoft or Google. Jellyfin replaces Netflix with a media server you control, running on hardware in your own home. Home Assistant integrates thousands of smart home devices and runs entirely locally, because your thermostat's automation logic shouldn't require a company's cloud to still be in business ten years from now.

These are not sacrifices. People who run them say they are faster, cheaper, and more reliable than what they replaced. They also mention something harder to pin down: the feeling of not being watched.

Sovereignty is a practical matter before it is a philosophical one. When you own your infrastructure, you are not subject to the whims of a platform's terms of service. You cannot be de-platformed. Your data cannot be sold to an advertiser, a government agency, or a hostile foreign nation because your data never leaves your control. You choose what happens to it, when, and why.

For families, this matters in a particular way. The platforms our children use are not neutral spaces. The Wall Street Journal published Facebook's own internal research in September 2021 showing that Instagram was "toxic for teen girls" on body image. One internal slide read: "We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls." Another found that among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13 percent of British users traced the feeling back to Instagram. The company knew. It continued (Wells, Horwitz, and Seetharaman, WSJ, 2021). Because the model requires engagement, and fear and shame and comparison drive engagement better than contentment does. A platform that genuinely served your daughter's flourishing would be a bad business by that logic.

The alternative is not to hand children different platforms and hope. The alternative is to build tools that serve families rather than mine them. Applications with no advertising model. Software whose only incentive is to work well for the person using it. Open-source projects that cannot hide algorithmic manipulation in their code because anyone can read it.

This is the frontier we are building on.

America has always generated its most durable institutions from people who refused to accept that the existing arrangements were fixed. The homesteader didn't wait for the railroad to decide where towns should be. The small manufacturer didn't wait for the bank to tell him what to make. They built what they needed because they needed it.

The same spirit is alive in the founders building sovereign infrastructure today. They are writing the software, running the servers, and shipping the tools. They don't ask permission from the platforms they're replacing. They don't apply for a seat at a table that was never meant for them.

Provenant exists to find those people and back them. Not because it is profitable in the near term, though we believe it will be. Because it is necessary. Because families deserve tools built by people who respect them. Because sovereignty is not a feature. It is a prerequisite for everything else.

Who owns your tools? Right now, probably someone who doesn't have your interests at heart.

That is a problem. And it is solvable.

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Sources

Federal Trade Commission. "FTC Staff Report Finds Large Social Media and Video Streaming Companies Have Engaged in Vast Surveillance of Users." FTC.gov, September 2024. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/ftc-staff-report-finds-large-social-media-video-streaming-companies-have-engaged-vast-surveillance

Alphabet Inc. "Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2024 Results." Investor Relations, January 2025. https://abc.xyz/investor/

Meta Platforms, Inc. "Meta Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Results." Investor Relations, January 2025. https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2025/Meta-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2024-Results/

Confessore, Nicholas, and Matthew Rosenberg. "Facebook Says Cambridge Analytica May Have Obtained Data on as Many as 87M Users." CNBC, April 4, 2018. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/04/facebook-updates-the-number-of-users-impacted-by-cambridge-analytica-leak-to-87-million-.html

Federal Trade Commission. "FTC Imposes $5 Billion Penalty and Sweeping New Privacy Restrictions on Facebook." FTC.gov, July 2019. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/07/ftc-imposes-5-billion-penalty-sweeping-new-privacy-restrictions-facebook

Wells, Georgia, Jeff Horwitz, and Deepa Seetharaman. "Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show." The Wall Street Journal, September 14, 2021. https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-toxic-for-teen-girls-company-documents-show-11631620739