The Globe and Mail reports in its Thursday edition that last month, a diplomatic cable from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed American diplomats to oppose regulations on how U.S. tech companies manage foreign data. The Globe's guest columnist Vass Bednar writes that the memo surfaced amid global efforts to enforce "data sovereignty" laws. It claimed that such laws could hinder the advancement of artificial intelligence technology. In other words, when countries attempt to govern their own data, Washington sees a problem. It seems ready to undermine other countries' regulation of their digital economies to safeguard a surveillance-based business model. The sovereignty question for this generation's reckoning with strategic autonomy is fundamentally tied to the invisible economy of information. As it stands, existing U.S. legislation allows American authorities to reach Canadian-held data through U.S.-controlled platforms in ways that would be unconstitutional if conducted by Canadian authorities domestically. We are already digital serfs, and it sucks. One key way to improve data governance is through strong privacy standards, and Canada is anticipating a long-overdue update to federal privacy law.