The Dark Side of Tech in Africa: Data Colonialism and Surveillance

Examining how African tech spaces are being monitored and exploited under the guise of progress.

Your grandmother’s recipes, your midnight confessions to friends, your banking details—all flowing through servers you’ll never see, owned by companies that barely acknowledge your existence.

I was fifteen when I first realized my phone was listening to me. Not in the tinfoil-hat, conspiracy-theory sense that gets you side-eyes at brunch, but in the quiet, lucrative way that makes tech companies billions. I’d casually mentioned wanting braids to my sister over lunch. By evening, Instagram served me an uncanny buffet of hair extension ads. At the time, it felt like magic. Now, it feels like extraction.

This is the story of how Africa became the world’s newest data colony—and why we’re only beginning to understand what we’ve lost.

The Seductive Promise of Connection

When smartphones hit Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, and beyond, they arrived like modern-day messiahs wrapped in the language of liberation. No more waiting on broken infrastructure. No more begging gatekeepers. Finally, Africans could bank themselves, tell their own stories, skip the queue.

And they did.

M-Pesa turned financial inclusion into a household phrase in Kenya. Jumia carved out an entire e-commerce economy in Nigeria. Twitter became the battlefield for activism, TikTok the dance floor for global virality. Young Africans didn’t just adopt tech—they hacked it for survival, for joy, for visibility.

But every revolution has a shadow. Ours is shaped uncannily like the colonial extractive systems we thought we’d buried. The new colonizers don’t wear uniforms. They don’t fly flags. They don’t need to. They have your data.

Extraction 2.0: When Data Becomes the New Gold

Just as gold, cocoa, and oil were once siphoned from African soil with reckless disregard, today it’s our data being mined—quietly, invisibly, and at scale.

Africa boasts over 500 million internet users. Every search, selfie, location ping, payment, and playlist becomes a data point—fuel for the recommendation engines, ad targeting systems, and AI models that power the modern digital economy. These digital footprints are worth billions. But virtually none of that value stays on the continent.

Facebook (now Meta) has over 200 million African users. Yet its revenue is routed through subsidiaries in Ireland or the U.S., minimizing local tax impact. Google refines its search engine using the behavioral data of millions across Africa but invests only a fraction of that value back into African education or infrastructure.

Even worse? This is not just economic extraction—it’s epistemic erasure. Our search histories, online habits, and languages become training data for AI systems that center Western logic. Our cultures become outliers, our dialects noise in the algorithm.

Designer Surveillance, African Edition

The tools that once promised emancipation now double as instruments of surveillance—often with the enthusiastic endorsement of African governments eager for control wrapped in innovation.

In Ethiopia, telecom surveillance has been used to monitor journalists. Nigeria banned Twitter after it became a megaphone for #EndSARS protests. Across the continent, governments are embracing surveillance systems—many supplied by Chinese firms like Huawei—that monitor citizens under the pretext of “public order.”

But the most pervasive surveillance is not political. It’s commercial.

Every “I accept” click is a surrender. Every like, every scroll, every purchase is logged. Tech giants know your spending habits, your insomnia schedule, your mental health battles. They know who you text at 2 a.m., and what you didn’t dare Google until 4.

And the data? It travels to cloud servers in California, Frankfurt, or Shanghai—processed under foreign privacy laws, leveraged in ways few of us understand. If an African government wants access, it must negotiate with multinationals that answer to distant shareholders, not local citizens.

Digital Dependency, Colonial Consequences

This isn’t just a privacy problem. It’s a sovereignty crisis.

We often talk about “decolonizing the curriculum” or “reclaiming the narrative.” But what does it mean to decolonize the internet? Or reclaim an algorithm?

When an African student in Johannesburg searches “African philosophy,” they’re more likely to find Stanford Encyclopedia entries than writings by local scholars. When a teenager in Dakar opens TikTok, they’re greeted with trends shaped by U.S. and Korean users. These aren’t harmless quirks—they’re systemic erasures.

Algorithms trained predominantly on Western users replicate those biases. Western beauty standards dominate Instagram. Anglo-centric histories dominate search results. African content becomes a digital minority even on African phones.

Meanwhile, the brightest tech talents—coders, UX designers, AI researchers—are recruited into global corporations where their labor powers systems they no longer control. It’s a brain drain cloaked in opportunity.

And the money? It flows one way.

Rewriting the Code: What Digital Sovereignty Could Look Like

But this isn’t a eulogy for African tech. It’s a call to reclaim it.

Rwanda is already ahead, with progressive data laws that require local data storage and explicit consent for cross-border transfers. Nigeria’s new Data Protection Commission is pushing global platforms to set up physical offices and respect local privacy frameworks. South Africa is piloting a national digital identity system aimed at giving users more control over their data.

Entrepreneurs are also rewriting the script. Flutterwave and Paystack are building pan-African financial infrastructures. Platforms like Afrostream and IROKOtv are creating culturally relevant entertainment for African audiences. Open-source projects like Ushahidi are offering decentralized, community-owned alternatives to Big Tech tools.

These efforts are nascent and uphill. They face fierce resistance from billion-dollar incumbents and a global ecosystem designed to reward scale, not sovereignty. But they offer a glimpse of what’s possible: a future where African data powers African prosperity.

The Questions That Haunt the Scroll

Late at night, as I doomscroll my phone—this device that knows me more intimately than my oldest friend—I’m left with questions I can’t ignore:

What would African-designed technology look like if it centered our values—Ubuntu, interdependence, storytelling?
Can we build algorithms that recognize our languages, our histories, our beauty, without needing to explain them?
Is it possible to be connected globally without being compromised locally?

These are not abstract policy puzzles. They are intimate choices about how we want to live, love, learn, and be remembered. Every app we download, every permission we grant, every digital trace we leave is a vote for a particular kind of future.

The smartphone in your pocket is either a tool of liberation or a weapon of extraction. The difference lies in who controls it—and whose interests it ultimately serves.

The sun is setting on the age of digital innocence. But the dawn is ours to code.

What does digital freedom look like to you? Comment below or share this piece if you believe Africa deserves a tech future built by us, for us.
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