The digitally sovereign state : An investigation into the attitude towards national data storage of personal data within Swedish public authorities

The number of scandals during the past years regarding the use and misuse of digital storage of personal infor-mation in combination with the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) within the EU member states, has resulted in a resurfaced discussion of sovereignty within the public sphere in relation to the storage of digital information. This master thesis examines the attitudes towards national data storage of personal data within twenty Swedish public agencies in the context of the analytical term Digital sovereignty.The thesis uses semi-structured interviews with employees working with data protection and qualitative con-tent analysis of internal documents connected to personal data management, in order to examine Swedish govern-ment agencies attitudes towards national data storage of personal information. The responses of the interviews and the internal policy documents in the area of personal data protections is viewed through the analytic term Digital sovereignty. The government agency the Swedish social security agency’s definition of Digital sovereignty is used in the thesis, which focuses on national governments ability to have control over both the technical and geograph-ical processing and storage of their citizen’s personal data.The thesis concludes that Swedish authorities takes the risk of transfer of personal data to third countries outside of the EU very seriously, while they also see the need to find legal ways to transfer personal data to these same countries. The thesis also concludes that Swedish government agencies try to avoid cloud services and are cautious in their use due to the implications they have for information and data security, while other research have shown that cloud services are used extensively within Swedish government agencies. The thesis also concludes that there is a lack of interest in national data storage of personal information within Swedish government, which can partially be attributed to the relationship between the General Data Protections Regulation and data storage regulation on a national level in Sweden. This leads to the final conclusion in this thesis, which is that there is some indication that the future of storage of personal data with the EU member states lies not in nationally managed cloud services, but rather in a federated cloud service on EU-level such as the currently ongoing project Gaia-X. This is a two years master's thesis in Archival science