"Ravi didn't know, and had no reason to know, that his daily check-ins were generating a data trail that would pass through seventeen corporate servers across nine countries before informing trading decisions at a quantitative hedge fund in Westport, Connecticut. I know this because I spent the better part of ten weeks tracing that trail."
"Smallholder farmers in India have historically been at the mercy of information asymmetry: they don't know real-time market prices, they can't access reliable weather forecasts, they have limited bargaining power against traders and middlemen. Digital tools were supposed to change that."
"AgriSense is free to download and free to use. It makes money the way most free apps make money: through the data its users generate. But the specifics matter. When Ravi opens AgriSense each morning, the app collects his GPS coordinates, the duration and pattern of his usage."
A soybean farmer named Ravi in Maharashtra uses AgriSense, a free weather and crop-pricing app in Marathi, to check daily weather forecasts and market prices. Unknown to him, his app usage generates a data trail passing through seventeen corporate servers across nine countries before reaching a quantitative hedge fund in Connecticut. AgriSense is one of many agricultural information tools proliferating across rural India since 2016, when mobile data costs collapsed. While these apps address genuine farmer needs—providing real-time market prices, weather forecasts, and reducing information asymmetry with traders—they monetize through user data collection. The app collects GPS coordinates, usage patterns, and other personal information, exemplifying a global surveillance economy that operates with structural violence beyond typical Western tech discussions.
#surveillance-economy #agricultural-technology #data-exploitation #rural-india #digital-farming-apps
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