(MENAFN) The new era of colonialism isn’t about resources like minerals or oil but about data—digital, pervasive, and unseen. From Nairobi’s slums to Manila’s neighborhoods, smartphones generate vast amounts of data, which, much like historical commodities such as spices and slaves, is quietly extracted and sent to cloud servers in tech hubs like Palo Alto and Shenzhen. This process, often disguised as “AI for Development,” is actually digital exploitation.

Major technology companies, primarily from the US and to some extent China, have turned the Global South into a vast source of behavioral data. They invest in infrastructure, provide connectivity, and fund pilot projects, but the benefits flow predominantly to the West. For example, voice recordings from Ghana train Western voice assistants, facial recognition data from Nigerian policing enhances surveillance software in the US, and agricultural information from Filipino farmers supports analytics for large agribusinesses that offer little benefit locally. This is the reality of AI-driven digital extraction.

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