What is data colonisation and why it matters to us in india

What is data colonisation and why it matters to us in India

What is data colonisation and why it matters to us in India.

Colonising a country no longer requires its physical invasion with military strength

Latest News Colony (n) is a country or area under the full or partial political control of another country and occupied by settlers from that country.

Data Colonisation (n) is a process by which a central system of power dominates the surrounding land and its components.

By those definitions, neither India nor any region of it is a colony of a dominant society, community or country anymore.

However, India and its population is no longer a nation that is defined by its physical presence alone either. We are all living our lives within the geographical boundaries of India and within the virtual boundaries of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, Airbnb, Uber, and hundreds of other mobile apps.

Our lives today are as much about our physical being as they are about our data. The only difference is that while we are conscious of our physical lives, we are seldom aware of how our data is being used by its custodians, which may not necessarily be a government but could very well be a multinational company based in a developed country.

When an individual lives within the territorial boundaries of a country, the latter is expected to safeguard the former’s identity, information, and privacy. However, who guarantees the same when lives (and their data) are no longer restricted to geographical boundaries but co-exist at multiple virtual locations in a 'connected world'? More importantly, how much control do they have over their identity and data? As more and more individuals go online and more and more information is turned digital, a strong race to compete for the ownership of data will be visible, if traces of it are not visible already. And the strength of the "coloniser" would be judged by the vastness of the data "colonised".

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