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Platform Sovereignty and the Privatisation of Human Identity

A. C. Applebee, L. N. Combe · 2026

Abstract

Five corporations – Google, Apple, Meta, GitHub, and Microsoft – function as de facto identity authorities for the majority of the world’s digital population. Their combined annual revenue exceeds $1.037 trillion, funded primarily by monetising identity data that users provided without meaningful consent. This thesis synthesises the academic frameworks of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), data colonialism (Couldry & Mejias, 2018), the smartness mandate (Halpern & Mitchell, 2022), and planetary surveillance (Pasquinelli, 2023) to demonstrate that corporate identity monopoly is not an accident of market dynamics but a structural feature of platform economics. We document the mechanism of identity privatisation through the “convenience trap” – a twenty-year sequence of individually rational decisions that produced collective captivity. We present empirical evidence of de-platforming as identity death through four documented cases: a father criminalised for medical photos of his child, a 25-year Apple customer locked out over a compromised gift card, blanket restriction of developers by nationality, and mass deletion of inactive accounts. We examine the self-sovereign identity (SSI) movement and explain why its technical solutions have failed to achieve adoption.

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