Data Sovereignty

Data Sovereignty and Control

How Atlas Amazon aligns with Indigenous data sovereignty, CARE Principles, and partner control over infrastructure, access, and sharing.

Atlas Amazon treats data as a strategic resource belonging to the peoples and communities it concerns. Openness is never a substitute for ownership, consent, and control.

What Data Sovereignty Means

Indigenous data sovereignty means the inherent rights and interests that Indigenous Peoples have in relation to the creation, collection, access, analysis, interpretation, management, dissemination, reuse and control of data relating to Indigenous Peoples. In the context of Indigenous data sovereignty, data are considered a strategic resource, and a framework for their ethical use is required to advance Indigenous Peoples’ collective well-being and self-determination. Restoring control over data, including that which was previously collected from Indigenous Peoples without their consent, should be recognized as a form of remedy for addressing historical injustices and correcting false narratives. This includes the establishment of effective mechanisms for data repatriation.

That definition comes from the UN Human Rights Council’s Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, in its study Right of Indigenous Peoples to data, including with regard to data collection and disaggregation (A/HRC/60/66).

It sits alongside the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance — Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, and Ethics — which together guide how the Atlas approaches contribution, hosting, publication, and reuse. See also Open Data.

Partner Control

Following the CARE Principles and the Expert Mechanism’s study, partners must be able to:

Control data collection, storage, and transmission across the project lifecycle
Access their data at all times
Be assured that no external parties have unauthorized access to their data
Make their own decisions about sharing data with third parties
Opt out or remove their data from the system at any time with minimal friction

These rights are fundamental and non-negotiable.

Why it Matters

Data about lands, territories, governance, and wellbeing has too often been collected, held, and reinterpreted without the consent or continuing authority of the peoples it describes.

Taking data sovereignty seriously therefore means treating control and repatriation as remedies for that history rather than optional features; designing the system so partners decide what is public, permissioned, or restricted; and making sure technical choices about hosting, access, and deletion follow governance decisions rather than the other way around.

The contribution, validation, and publication pathways in the Atlas are built to support these requirements in practice. The related technical choices are described under Data Hosting.