Imagine waking up in a home that adjusts to your needs. After you wake up, the lights turn on, the thermostat adjusts to your favorite morning temperature, and your coffee machine starts brewing—without you lifting a finger. This is the Internet of Things, or IoT, at work.
The Internet of Things is a network of everyday objects—like your fridge, car, or even your watch—that are connected to the internet and can communicate with each other. These devices are equipped with sensors, software, and small computers that let them collect and share data.
Think of them as little digital messengers that help the physical world talk to the digital world. They are used everywhere, from homes and offices to farms, factories, and cities.
Connected devices are more common and often are used in homes, workplaces, cities, and public infrastructure. While this leads to better comfort and efficiency, it also introduces new ties to their respective providers.
Reliance on proprietary software and cloud services can limit user control over the products they bought. Software support may end, data may be stored externally in the cloud, and functional hardware may become obsolete.
As connected technologies proliferate, issues of control, privacy, resilience, and sustainability become more significant.
Issues can start when you either purchase devices from multiple vendors, or some of your devices stop being supported. For example you buy a smart thermostat, you download the app from the vendor. The device performs its function well, and then you decide to invest and buy a different type of product, like a smart plug. The vendor (let's call them vendor A), that you purchased the thermostat doesn't make any smart plugs, so you decide to buy it from a vendor B. To operate the plug you need a different app.
You get used to this, you are fluent in both of the apps, and after few years the vendor A goes out of business and stops supporting your thermostat. Because of the strong ties to the cloud the device you bought, and that worked fine yesterday, now doesn't work, and you are forced to buy a new one, from a different vendor.
Instead of relying entirely on the manufacturer's app and cloud service, you can use community-driven platforms such as Home Assistant or OpenHAB. When devices support local control and open standards, platforms such as Home Assistant or OpenHAB can reduce dependence on vendor cloud services and help keep your data under your control. This shift to open software can also has the added benefit of centralizing all of your devices, so you can create more powerful automations, that leverage interaction between the devices from different vendors.
Explore Home Assistant and OpenHAB.
Consider open standards for smart-city deployments.
Contribute to open IoT projects.
Support procurement rules that favor interoperable and open systems.
The device may be in your home or in your city, but if it depends on somebody else's servers and software, you don't fully control it. Digital sovereignty in IoT means being able to decide how your devices operate, where your data is stored, and whether they continue working in the future.
Smart devices should remain functional even if a vendor changes its business model or discontinues its services.
Convenience and automation should not require you to relinquish control over your devices or data.
If you cannot understand, repair, adapt, or transition away from a technology, true control is lacking.
Digital sovereignty in IoT allows us to determine how connected devices function and where the generated data is stored, which also informs us who manages the underlying infrastructure.
It also involves minimizing unnecessary reliance on a single vendor, cloud service, or platform. While open software and standards themselves do not guarantee digital sovereignty, they support transparency, interoperability, local control, and long-term resilience.