ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author analyses how the digital literacy initiatives by hacker and digital rights groups in Germany promote and appropriate a sovereign and safe Internet use in the era of Big Data and increased data surveillance. She discusses the forms of empowerment in the digital world that the media literacy initiatives display and discuss in their work. The ‘Digital Youth Project’ carried out a large, multi-site ethnographic study to try to understand the mechanisms of informal learning in digital environments. The analysis of what ‘digital literacy’ means in the work of ‘Chaos Macht Schule’ gives an insight into not only the challenges of the online world, but also the forms of empowerments their members – and other like-minded initiatives – promote. The initiative’s data training consists of modes of resisting data-tracking mechanisms that are built into devices and web services.
