"I asked a simple question: what happens when this model gets licensed to a lender in West Africa? The founder paused. He said the model was "geography-agnostic." That it captured "universal behavioral signals." I wrote that phrase down because I knew, with near certainty, that it was wrong."
"What I found is a story about infrastructure, assumptions, and the quiet export of one society's norms disguised as neutral technology. This is what digital colonialism actually looks like when you zoom in close enough to see the wiring."
"The credit-scoring model I tracked was built on a training dataset drawn from roughly 1.2 million users across Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. These are countries with high smartphone penetration, reliable cellular infrastructure, and populations that interact with digital platforms in patterns shaped by those specific economies."
A credit-scoring startup built an algorithm using Southeast Asian mobile usage patterns to assess creditworthiness for unbanked populations. The founder claimed the model was geography-agnostic and captured universal behavioral signals. However, when this algorithm was licensed to lenders in West Africa and other regions, it systematically rejected small business owners and gig workers despite their creditworthiness. The model's training data reflected specific economic conditions, infrastructure reliability, and digital interaction patterns unique to Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. This represents digital colonialism—the export of one society's norms disguised as neutral technology, creating financial exclusion through culturally-embedded algorithmic assumptions applied across incompatible contexts.
#algorithmic-bias #digital-colonialism #financial-inclusion #machine-learning-infrastructure #global-technology-export
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