What is Data Autonomy about, and why do we care?

Without data there are no e-mails, no shared agendas, no (video) calls, no notifications, no documents, no assignments, no degree certificates, and no research contents. I would not be able to write these words and they would not be easily accessible to a broad audience without data. This is so ‘normal’ that we hardly ever think about it. Only the exceptional circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic provoked us to question the societal role of Universities in times of datafication (‘yet another streaming service’). But we must not overlook that the migration of the data of the global top Universities ‘to the cloud’ is a trend that has been going on for at least a decade, and increasingly affects all forms of education.