Digital Footprint, Global Fault Lines: Data Extraction From The Global South And The Case For A Binding International Privacy Rule
Piyush Rajpurohit, Jai Narain Vyas University
ABSTRACT
A single search query in Nairobi, a mobile money transfer in Singapore, or a photograph uploaded in Jodhpur each leaves behind a "digital footprint" that persists and travels far beyond its point of creation. This paper argues that the routine cross-border extraction of personal data generated in the Global South, and its processing for value by corporations headquartered in the jurisdictions that also write the governing rules, replicates the structural logic of historical resource colonialism. Drawing on Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholarship and the "data colonialism" framework advanced by Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejías, the paper contends that existing national privacy statutes the EU's GDPR, India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, and China's PIPL are structurally incapable of correcting this imbalance because each operates within domestic jurisdictional limits while the harm they address is inherently transnational. Mechanisms intended to bridge this gap, such as the GDPR's adequacy regime, function less as neutral safeguards than as instruments of digital diplomacy that extend trust along existing lines of economic power, while international trade law treats cross-border data flows chiefly as a market-access question. Using India's "scale without leverage" position and the outsourced AI data-labour supply chain in the Global South as case studies, the paper proposes a binding international privacy rule modelled on the Nagoya Protocol's access-and-benefit-sharing architecture, built on three pillars: an affirmative recognition of data sovereignty as co-equal to free data flow, mandatory cross-border data impact assessments, and a benefit-sharing mechanism for value generated from data or data labour originating in the Global South.
Keywords: Data colonialism, TWAIL; data sovereignty; cross-border data flows; Global South; GDPR adequacy; Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023; Nagoya Protocol; benefit-sharing; international privacy law.
