# ADR 000002 Data Sovereignty GitBook

**Date:** May 2026\
**Status:** Accepted\
**Decider:** NikiDigitals\
**Version:** GitBook — Thinking Layer

## The Question

LES is not a productivity app. It is a personal enterprise resource planning system that will hold, over time, a complete record of a human life — financial history, health data, relationship notes, learning progression, daily patterns. The question of where that data lives and who controls it is not a technical detail. It is a foundational design principle.

## The Decision

All personal data in LES resides in a personal Azure tenant under full NikiDigitals control. The architecture is designed from the start to support selective expansion — connecting external services where genuinely useful — but the core data layer is never delegated to a third party by default.

## Why This Matters

Most productivity and personal management tools are built on a trade: convenience in exchange for data residency on someone else's infrastructure, under someone else's terms. That trade is reasonable for many use cases. For LES it is not acceptable. A system designed to be the operating layer of a life cannot be dependent on the continued existence, goodwill, or pricing decisions of an external platform.

The personal Azure tenant provides a different proposition: full visibility, full control, and full auditability. Every access event is logged. Every piece of data is encrypted. The geographic location of the data is chosen deliberately — EU Azure regions, aligned with the strongest data protection frameworks in the world.

This does not mean LES is closed. The architecture explicitly supports connecting external services where they add genuine value. A fitness tracker, a bank API, a calendar service — these can feed data into LES. But the data flows in, not out. LES is the record of truth, not a relay.

## The Principle Going Forward

Every time LES connects to an external service, the question is asked: what data is shared, with whom, under what terms, and is that justified? Each answer is documented. Data sovereignty is not a one-time decision — it is an ongoing discipline.


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