Privacy from Below: Grassroots, Creative Computing, and Digital Sovereignty in Europe

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.

Adopting a situated, mixed-methods design that combines desk research and selective interviews, the paper offers a comparative account of privacy governance across the EU's rights-based regime (GDPR, DSA, DMA, AI Act), the U.S. market-led model and China's state-centric model. Its case studies cover European grassroots actors such as noyb, IuRe and Digitální Svobody, DECODE, Tactical Tech, K-Monitor, Panoptykon Foundation, D3 – Defesa dos Direitos Digitais, SHARE Foundation, Državljan D, Open Rights Group, Privacy International and Wikipedia contributors. Further chapters examine ethical approaches (autonomy, informed consent, data justice, contextual integrity, and machine unlearning) and technical approaches (privacy-enhancing technologies, free/libre open source software, creative computing and tactical media) to grassroots privacy protection.

By framing privacy as a commons – an infrastructure vital to both individual autonomy and democratic publicness – the paper charts pathways beyond compliance-driven regulation and closes with policy and practice recommendations for supporting 'digital sovereignty from below'.

This publication is based upon work from COST Action CA21141 GRADE – Grassroots of Digital Europe (https://costgrade.eu/), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).