THE DATA COLONIALISM: How Tech Giants Are Exploiting the Global South
THE DATA COLONIALISM: How Tech Giants Are Exploiting the Global South EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: 1. The New Frontier of Exploitation: Just as empires of the past extracted physical resources (gold, rubber, oil) from their colonies, modern tech giants extract a new, invisible resource: Data. This process is known as "Data Colonialism." 2. The Asymmetry of Value: Tech companies from the Global North (US and China) provide "free" services (social media, search engines, e-commerce) to the Global South. In return, they harvest massive amounts of raw data. The data is then processed by algorithms in the West, generating trillions of dollars in value, while the countries that generated the data receive almost nothing. 3. The Sovereignty Threat: When the digital lives of 200 million Indonesians are stored on servers in California or Virginia, they are subject to foreign laws (like the US CLOUD Act). This creates a massive vulnerability in national security, privacy, and economic so...