This paper discusses the interaction between digital technologies and human users, describing how protecting individual choice and agency is essential to any trustworthy system. To effectively establish and maintain digital trust, these individuals must be able to recognize themselves as stakeholders with the agency to self-navigate digital technologies.

It raises examples from the data management space, a sector at the forefront of navigating digital trust considerations, to explore how organizations can make decisions that enable individual agency and foster digital trust. The paper applies by-design principles to transparency, digital literacy and privacy, offering suggestions for how these concepts can be embedded into the user’s experience of a digital product or service.

Among the various dimensions of digital trust, three of the most relevant are highlighted due to their direct relationship with individual agency: transparency, privacy and redressability.