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| Research and Reports |
| Uneven Datafication In Dialogues on Digital Society, Azadeh Akbari brings a geographical lens to debates on data colonialism, drawing on the literature on coloniality, uneven development, and dependency theory to highlight how datafication is neither homogeneous nor universal, but is instead marked by colonial continuities, spatial differentiation, and temporal unevenness. The paper investigates three interrelated dynamics—(de-/re-)territorialisation, dispossession, and unequal exchange—to show how global cycles of differentiation and totalisation perpetuate inequality in ways that sustain capitalist structures. The conversation is extended by five insightful responses from Yung Au, Payal Arora, Sareeta Amrute, Jathan Sadowski, and Orit Halpern, who further develop and critically engage with the concept through their reflections. The dialogue concludes with a response by Akbari herself. Read the article here. AI Sovereignty from the Global Majority In this roundtable panel at this year’s Computers, Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP) conference, Nicolo Zingales (FGV Direito Rio), Cecilia Rikaap (University College of London), Divij Joshi (ODI Global), Melody Musoni (European Center for Development Policy Management), and Sebastiano Toffaletti (Digital SME Alliance) discuss how Global Majority countries can meaningfully design AI sovereignty from the bottom up. While problematizing the outsized power of American and Chinese tech companies operating in India, Brazil and the African continent, the discussants propose to reintroduce what has often been neglected in digital sovereignty discourse: democratic and participatory visions of what digital and AI sovereignty can look like. Watch the conversation here. Digital Domination: AI, Surveillance, and Digital Power in Palestine and Beyond This book brings together research conducted by five emerging scholars from Palestine and the wider region – Islam Al-Khatib, Arees Bishara, Sarah Farhallah, Melody Sepahpour, and Rawan Natscheh – which advances our understanding of AI, surveillance, and Palestinian digital rights that are currently under siege. By critically analyzing Israeli public-private technology partnerships and the weaponization of wider Big Tech ecosystems (i.e., Google and Meta), all five contributions shed light on how violence is enacted on an entire population of Palestinians through AI and surveillance technologies. Read more here. Unveiling Cyber-Surveillance Technologies in South Asia Digital Rights Foundation (DRF)’s latest regional scoping study investigates the surveillance practices across four South Asian countries: Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. It traces the historical trajectory of the booming surveillance industry in each region while highlighting the insufficiency of current governance mechanisms. The report helps illuminate how surveillance practices may not follow a uniform and straightforward adoption process, especially in the Global Majority. Read more here. Geopolitics of Digital Sovereignty: Contested Networks, Territories and Self-determination This collection of articles edited by George Glasze, Amaël Cattaruzza, Finn Dammann, and Frédérick Douzet emphasizes the importance of spatial context in ongoing digital sovereignty discourse. Bringing together case studies from China, India, Russia, Cuba, Iran, the U.S., and Europe, they put forward the idea that digital sovereignty is not a singular concept, but a multifaceted one situated within differing historical trajectories underpinned by varying infrastructural and socio-economic conditions particular to each region. Together, they contest the Westphalian notion of sovereignty and argue that sovereignty is “better understood as a political myth rather than as an empirical category” by unpacking the layered and often contradictory notions of sovereignty in current debates. Read more here. Watching the watchers: Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and the participatory panopticon of surveillance technologies in Nigeria As African states ramp up efforts to procure surveillance technologies, non-state actors are stepping in to perform public oversight. In this article, Dare Leke Idowu interrogates the rise of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in Nigeria and its effectiveness at achieving accountability. While the watchdog role that CSOs play allows for citizens to exercise agency, the article argues that their capacity is nonetheless constrained by legislative deficiencies and is mostly limited to awareness building. Read more here. F(r)ictions: Creative Work in an Age of AI Bringing together practitioners, scholars, and students, the symposium hosted at the Lab for AI, Ethics, & Creative Labor at the Parsons School of Design explored the disruptive forces of AI in the creative industry alongside pathways towards resistance. Putting human experiences of frontline creative work at the forefront of debate, the conversations ranged from philosophical discussions about the human value of creativity, legal questions concerning worker rights and issues of copyright, to the exploration of ethical alternative practices. Read the transcript of the symposium here. Towards a new paradigm of “datafied development”: Epistemic, infrastructural, economic, and geopolitical domains This introduction to the special issue advances the concept of datafied development to explain how development promises are increasingly entangled with new modalities of (AI) governance. While the deployment of digital technologies against vulnerable populations is nothing new, the article illustrates the need to be attentive to how dependencies are formulated and value is extracted through the negotiation of epistemic, infrastructural, economic, and geopolitical power. Read more here. Policed by Code: AI, Gender and Justice in the Global South Employing an intersectional and transnational approach, Piyush Mishra demonstrates how gender, race, caste, and class play into the disproportionate targeting of women by AI-powered surveillance and predictive policing tools. The paper investigates three distinct urban cases: Hyderabad, India; Lagos, Nigeria; and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It puts forward the framework of Algorithmic Harm Cascade to understand how historical data inequalities manifest in contemporary forms of exclusion. Read more here. Understanding the impact of colonial legacy on public oversight of digital surveillance in post-colonial SADC countries Investigating digital surveillance oversight systems in four African countries – Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) – this article highlights how colonial legacies continue to taint public oversight within the African continent. Instead of working to counter the abuse of surveillance technology, the mechanism of public oversight is co-opted by authoritarian actors and practices. Read more here. |
| News |
| India and its Dependence on Chinese Surveillance Cameras State-backed Chinese surveillance camera providers were recently banned in India following revelations that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was secretly acquiring live footage of defense installations through Chinese networks. There is a need to look beyond the hardware, however. While Indian brands now dominate the CCTV camera market, the country is still heavily reliant on Chinese surveillance technology when it comes to cloud and data storage. Read more here. The AI-powered World Cup runs on thousands of data workers AI and sensors have become an integral component of the FIFA World Cup (and the growing betting industry that accompanies it). However, a lot of it runs on the meticulous data annotation work that is being done by thousands of data workers in countries such as India, Cambodia, and the Philippines. While this year’s World Cup is projected to be the most profitable tournament in sporting history, this article highlights that it would not have been possible without the labor force behind it. Read more here. WFP, Palantir, and the pope Not even a week after a scathing report published by Tech for Bad which exposed the egregious partnership between the United Nations’ World Food Program (WFP) and Palantir, Pope Leo XIV visited the WFP headquarters in Rome to praise the organization for their commitment to international solidarity. This recently published article from the New Humanitarian questions why the UN-backed food and aid assistance program continues to partner with an American military defense manufacturer while governments around the world are increasingly cutting ties. Read more here. The Quiet Erosion of Collective Action Under Digital Surveillance United Nations Special Rapporteur Gina Romero presses that our freedom of peaceful assembly is being threatened. This is most visible in youth activism where university campuses are increasingly transforming into securitized spaces. The consequences are dire: the chilling effect of surveillance is gradually killing collective action, both in the physical and digital domain. Read more of what is at stake here. India’s Aadhaar Shows Foreign Dependencies Reach Beyond US-China India has been at the forefront of digital sovereignty debates, positioning itself against tech giants from the USA and China. However, when digital sovereignty is narrowly defined against certain geopolitical competitors, it overshadows the actual configuration of dependency underlying these claims. This article discusses how Japanese technology firms fly under the radar when digital sovereignty is reduced to geopolitical hedging. Read more here. Israeli command system identified 850,000 targets in Gaza and Lebanon wars, says supplier Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms supplier, confirmed at a military conference that it had detected 850 thousand targets in Gaza and Lebanon since October 2023. Specialists warn that it is highly unlikely that each of these targets were thoroughly and properly vetted based on the sheer amount of such attacks. The same supplier has since expanded its collaboration with the IDF’s digital army programme Tzayad to develop artificial intelligence to support decision-making on the ground. Read more here. The Attention Extraction Machine: How AI Advertising Created a $595 Billion Economy Built on $1.32 Per Hour Labor Investigative journalist Achechukwu Ajuzieogu from Aylgorith breaks down the exploitative AI advertising industry. The investigation includes striking statistics: nearly 90% of wage margins are captured by intermediaries in Nairobi; 81% of content moderators in Kenya were diagnosed with PTSD; and Indian content creators earn up to 47 times less than their American counterparts. Its most illuminating claim is how value differentials built into the economic model of advertising exploits labor from the Global South, while investment in the same regions are kept at bay, maintaining and often exacerbating the divide. Read more here. How Palestinians are Building a Digital Archive that can’t be Erased As Palestinian culture, heritage, and memory continue to be erased by Israeli forces through the active destruction of cultural artifacts and institutions, Palestinians have built an archive that cannot be destroyed: through a digital repository of Palestinian photographs and artwork. The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive displays more than 500,000 digitized artifacts which Amer Shomali, general director of the Palestinian museum, calls an “unlootable archive.” Read more here. |
| Art and Interventions |
| Planetary AI: Beyond the Screens, Behind the Systems, through the Global Production Networks In collaboration with the Techworker Community Africa, the Planetary AI network released ten illustrations designed by Njung’e Wanjiru depicting the socio-ecological costs of AI and the crucial labor force that serve the backbones of the “seamless” operations of large-scale AI systems. The illustrations are available for non-commercial use (i.e., presentations, teaching, and research). Read more here. Joint statement on AI in warfare Access Now, alongside over 200 civil society organizations and individuals, recently released a joint statement condemning companies and states around the world for accelerating the militarization of AI technology. They call for companies and states to take measures against the usage of AI in human rights violations. They do so by asking tech companies to refrain from entering into contracts with military agencies and states to cease the use of AI tools in carrying out military targeting. Read the statement here. Open letter to UK Government condemning Home Office border tool aimed at asylum-seeking children In response to the UK government’s plan to employ experimental AI facial age estimation (FAE) technology on children crossing the UK border, more than 60 organizations, including Human Rights Watch, have signed a petition calling for the immediate halt of the deployment of such defective and discriminatory systems. Read the statement here. |
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| Surveillance in The MajorityWorld Research Network aims to expand the scope of surveillance studies to include non-Northern/Western discourses and practices. It is a place for exchange, collaboration, and activism against the undemocratic use of surveillance technologies. |