Data Colonialism

Data colonialism is the extraction and exploitation of data from populations and territories for the benefit of distant corporate or state actors, reproducing colonial power relations through digital infrastructure. It is not merely a privacy violation but a structural relationship in which data flows from the periphery to centers of computational power, where it is refined into predictive models and sold back as services. The same feedback loops that sustain platform capitalism also sustain data colonialism: platforms harvest data from users, extract value, and govern the resulting infrastructure according to their own interests.