Data Colonialism: How Powerful Nations Control the Digital Lives of the Global South

-- KavisaraManeepun - 24 Mar 2025

Introduction

In the 19th century, colonial powers sought natural resources; however, in the 21st century, they seek data. Nowadays, major economies and big tech companies control digital infrastructure and global data flows, often at the expense of developing countries in Global South. Companies like Google, Huawei, Microsoft, and Amazon collect massive user data to expand their economic while controlling key internet infrastructure. As developing nations rely more on these external digital platforms, they face risks of privacy violations, limiting their technological sovereignty. This paper examines how data extraction, weak regulations and imbalance of power lead to data colonialism. It argues that developing nations should increase local people’s awareness, enforce data localization, and strengthen legal protections to lessen reliance on foreign platforms.

Under the past colonial, the colonialism refers to the control of physical land, labor and natural resources. Today, with the advancement of technology, a new form of colonial has been emerged, known as a “data colonialism”. According to Scholar Couldry and Mejias, data colonialism refers to a “combines the predatory extractive practices of historical colonialism with the abstract quantification methods of computing.” https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/89511/1/Couldry_Data-colonialism_Accepted.pdf. Under this concept, data represents as a new form of resource appropriation dominated by at least two poles of colonial powers: Western and Chinese tech giants. These two create communication networks with the sole aim of collecting data, profiting from it, and retaining it as raw material for data analytics https://globalsouthseries.in/2023/01/25/digital-colonialism-neo-colonialism-of-the-global-south.

Global South countries, including South Asia, Latin America, and Africa, use tech giant companies’ digital platforms, such as Google cloud storage, Amazon internet, or Huawei AI, to store their data. However, because their data resides on external servers, these Global South countries lack complete control over their own information. Meanwhile, the laws from big tech countries also raised legal concern over the privacy of this data. For example, the U.S. Cloud Act grants the authority to government to access electronic data held by US-based technology companies, even if such data is stored on server outside United States. https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/legal-notices/trust-center/us-cloud-act. Therefore, the data that is stored, collected, and used by Global South’s citizens will be used for the benefit of the powerful nations rather than their own, vulnerable to foreign surveillance and corporate appropriation.

One case of tech giant’s dominance is the supply of surveillance technologies from China to the Global South countries. For example, the Zimbabwean government installed facial recognition technology from Cloudwalk in public spaces to monitor activists https://adf-magazine.com/2023/01/zimbabwe-turns-to-chinese-technology-to-expand-surveillance-of-citizens/. This has been done with a lack of legislation regulating what happens to the collected data and with no clear safeguard for how to process it. Moreover, Zimbabwe also has a nationwide rollout of mobile phone telecommunications equipment from Huawei. While concerns around the security of this Huawei communication equipment have seen by the United States leading a call for banning usage, Zimbabwe was tied with this tech giant company without having adequate legal frameworks to justify this usage and ignoring the fact that in China itself, these technologies were used to steal data from the Uyghur community https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/4692/huawei-and-surveillance-zimbabwe. The mentioned cases reflect what happened in the past colonial times, where the profits and control remain in powerful hands, while the costs in terms of loss of autonomy and privacy are borne by the poorer nations.

The challenges faced by the Global South countries are not purely a failure of governance but also a result of the lack of awareness and imbalance of power in the structure of the global digital system. People in many developing countries lack knowledge about the collection or use of their data. As Couldry and Mejias said, the digital platforms usually become people’s everyday interaction without them realizing what they are giving up. At the same time, unlike European countries that have strong data privacy regulation like GDPR, countries in the Global South mostly lack such legal protection, making it easy for big tech companies to use these data for their own profit. Moreover, even where the law exists, the penalties are sometimes too weak to stop the violation by these tech giant companies. For example, Uber still operates even in breach of local law since the cost of penalties for running a business is lower than the benefit of operating it (e.g., in 2016, a French court fined Uber for running illegal services) https://www.csis.org/analysis/real-national-security-concerns-over-data-localization.

Global South countries need to take clear steps to reclaim their digital futures and fight back against data colonialism. One solution is to build strategic knowledge and culture for local people and to find new space for internet and digital governance. This new space should be supported by the United Nations rather than by the U.S. or other tech giants’ institutions in order to help developing countries create their own fair data laws and strategies to combat the data privacy violations done by powerful nations. One strategy that could be led by the United Nations is to emerge South-South cooperation as a tool for strengthening data statistic and capacities between Global South countries to develop common standards to stop further exploitation. Moreover, countries may adopt the regulation about 'localizing digitization,' which mandates the local storage of consumer data. While this might limit global data flows, it could be a beneficial step to give countries better control of their citizens’ data and build a fairer power balance. Alternatively, the ‘nationalizing data’ approach may be done by requiring tech companies to pay for data they collect. In this way, the data will be used not just for private profits but for the benefit of their public.

Today’s tech giants control data similarly to how colonial powers appropriated land and resources. The control over their data falls beyond reach for countries in the Global South. To reclaim digital sovereignty, developing countries must have stronger data legislation and educate their citizens, while keeping data within national borders and work together to create regulations that protect their digital rights.