A lot of work to do particularly when it comes to absentee ballots as well so they will all have to be added so a warning to people watching across the world this election which has been as you see contentious it has been difficult it has been hard fought but it might not end in the next few hours it could be a couple of days before we get a final result so people should be weary of politicians declaring victory unless on either side the result is clear cut the polls suggest thats whats going to happen donald trump says in 2016 they said the exact same thing and they won and hes clinging on to that hope. At least 14 people have been arrested in austria after mondays shooting in vienna and the memorial was held for the 4 people who died another 22 were injured when a gunman opened fire in the city hall soon authorities are describing it as a terror attack. Police in ivory coast have clashed with supporters of former president and Opposition Leader only conan betty it happened as police were trying to enter his house to arrest him it came just hours after president Alassane Ouattara is declared the winner of the president ial election there you know opposition says its creating its own Transitional Government ugandan Opposition Leader and musician bobby wine has been released after earlier being arrested according to a spokesman for his party one was forcefully taken out of his vehicle by police after handing in his president ial nomination papers supporters gathered outside his home after he was released hes been calling for a long time president Yoweri Museveni to step down. Those are the headlines the news will be continuing here on all does it all for all hail the algorithm and of course weve got all the u. S. Election updates on the web sites al jazeera dot com. Think of some of the Biggest Companies in the world today. Microsoft facebook we chat all of them big tech with algorithms that they. Let more than just uses all customers will these businesses would generate is done and they need us to like them for them to be indispensable because the more that we use them the more data we produce where in the midst of a great race for dot and. Companies are on the checks. For the past 3 years academics nichol dri analysts have been investigating a phenomenon they call datta colonialism. While the modes scales in context may have changed they say colonialism same underlying functions of empire building extraction and appropriation remain the new lang grab going on theres not land thats being grabbed its us its human life the acquisition the construction of data valuable data for corporate use out of the floor of our lives thats the lag read going on and thats why the work is the only way does justice to that lets think for instance of all the and use her license agreements or the terms of use that we read whenever we sign up for a new social media platform and if we think about the process of being asked to agree to something that we cannot even understand and signing away certain rights signing away our property in this act i think its a very interesting were not for one moment saying. Colonialism today with data involved the same horrific level of violence that was involved in the beginnings of colonialism. But saying that the core of historic colonus and was the force to involve people in a massive new system a new order a new organization of the World Economy in the history of kuoni listen weve had different empires arms of course we can think of this kranish empire the British Empire i think we would say at this point in history in terms of data colonialism we have 2 centers of power and we have the United States on one side and china in the other and of course we know the american corporations very well in terms of Google Facebook amazon maybe we dont know the trainees corporations very well because their reach is just beginning to expand. Beyond china so far china has been kind of like an internal colony but we are starting to see how these corporations how the infrastructure developed in trying out is starting to expand to 2 different parts of the world including asia and africa. The chinas biggest private company well way to acknowledge this africa has been a goldmine of so its countries like south Africa Nigeria kenya which is where now had delivered some of the biggest most rapidly growing telecom its. Has studied the way effect here in kenya theyre Building Products for example that are suited to the African Market the cheapest mobile phone that you can get in various African Markets its a chinese phone so youre pulled out of almost like you looked on months of both in the food store and theyre building relationships with governments theyre providing infrastructure so while we has provided a lot of infrastructure for. Surveillance in kenya and i see team kenya to work in every country whether its developed by the big or somewhere in the middle and thats really useful for governments here so we advise you know on that Government Data centers on that you Government Services or anything else we can share those its bases from around the world and the nice thing is of course it provides benefits of people connected to our business so that generating revenue as well but the other piece of the chinese influence is the surreptitious war theres a lot of questions about Data Collection with technology thats coming in from china and in some ways its the other side of the court right there is a whole lot of data thats being taken out from african countries and from African Citizens to be kept handled used by people who are not necessarily responsible or answerable to African People so while it is not. Access peoples data or cell data so i dont think that we are the kind of company. That are benefitting off peoples data the only data that were using is just to improve our product themselves such as using Artificial Intelligence our smartphones in our network of quitman so it can improve be faster there are skeptics who would question adams assertion after all most Big Tech Companies do exploit use a darter in some way however even if while way doesnt do it there are other chinese operations in africa that collect and make extensive use of peoples data. Here in nairobi the dominance of chinese tech is undeniable from telecommunication lines to Satellite Networks right down to the planes in peoples hands and the apps on those fights Chinese Companies have this market and much of the data it produces in its cross trends in holdings for instance sells to over 40 percent of the mobile market in Subsaharan Africa its fun someone to the brand names techno i tell and in phoenix but its strategy doesnt end with the hardware data driven apps like the Music Streaming Service play and Digital Payment platform pompei add to a growing repository of data on african uses and can help boost money making opportunities for transients when you think about those and i think any i think the thing that gets lost is that the primary objective it was about money was fundamentally about using power using culture using all these kinds of tools to impose one society in another societies throughout the 1st society could make money off of that where you define corner as a map that then you really start to see the resonances in china has been investing in africa many parts of asia for 2030 years very systematically is never pretended that the earth is doing anything other than expanding its economic interests it does not use. Civilizing rhetoric because it doesnt need to lets contrast that for the moment with a company like microsoft which talks about democratizing ai or facebook that is concerned to give as it were connection cometary can just be a privilege for some of the rich and powerful and needs to be something that everyone shares. Facebook has made a big push to present itself as a benevolent force to get people online since 2013 the company has been leading a giant project called internet dot all sort of gateway to the World Wide Web for those with poor connectivity. The app that serves as the portal to facebooks version of the internet is called free basics and its been launched in at least 60 countries more than half of them in africa the idea is to provide access to select sites without data charges in effect its a stripped down version of the internet that has one very important component guaranteed connection with facebook and guaranteed possibilities of data extraction which is why despite the companys slick marketing not everyone is convinced that this is an entirely selfless exercise nonjury cimbali is a leading to general rights advocate i think whats most interesting in the it what ill call technicality x. Is the rush to connect the unconnected and the rush to retain the connected in very specific platforms a lot of these actors will do anything and everything to make sure at some point or other these users go through their platforms because its all about the data its all about how much data can i get about peoples of arkansas ads so that you know concrete predictive things to keep them hooked into what im able to offer and therefore the world will keep churning theres no way that a lot of these Tech Companies will be able to behave in their home countries the way they behave in the developing world there is no way that you would be able to roll out a project as big as free basic. Without some kind of check or balance would some without some kind of ethical. There was no effort to even say this is what this means this is how this will work for you and that is really telling right of what they think that African People want and or need from the internet projects that are largely in this case emerging from a Silicon Valley or western america centric approach to connecting the unconnected i really did deeply steeped in the same condescending ways of doing development so this notion that give them something that is better than nothing i mean why would anyone not want that data colonialism is framed in terms of a civilizational mission when people are connected we can accomplish some Pretty Amazing things just like historical colonialism was framed as well in terms of bringing progress bringing something that is good and beneficial for humanity we can get closer to the people that we care about we can get access to jobs and opportunities and our participation is expected and our petition pretty soon we are told its for our own good meanwhile all of this extraction and capturing of the you know is kind of happening in the background we dont do consequences d the Facebook Free basics model which is basically about expanding for facebook the demain of data extraction across the world at a time when demand for facebook is beginning to fall amongst younger people in particular in the socalled west. Is very interesting just as in historic colonialism the apparent weakness of the colonized populations that lack of weapons their lack of certain results is the lack of an economic structure suggested to the colonizers that they need to be colonized they need to have whatever the colonial system would offer them to bind them in. Free basics is just one of facebooks many initiatives across africa. Facebooks latest push here in kenya is called express why 5 companies teamed up with local Internet Service providers to install y. 5 hotspots like here in the mass my town of eagle on the outskirts of nairobi. Jerry in basia is a hairdresser who signed up as of into facebooks express why. He gets a commission on every dot a bundle he sells his customers say they love it they do his 1st book because even myself i use it im a friend of the band of keep it your book. Compared to other networks you get a 501100 in business for free yeah. You run. Yes they do they find it cheaper to fund it when the book and then the doctors dont express why fi has been an undeniable success here it is made web access cheap enough of People Living in underserved locations then there are so many People Living i dont want a corner to be. However for those studying the activities of facebook and other Big Tech Companies in kenya its impossible to ignore the huge potential for data mining last year facebook was pushed to admit that it had added its own software to the wife i Access Points that enabled non facebook data such as customer names and phone numbers to directly flow to the corporation while Facebook Says the purpose of the software Eastern Shore that hotspots of functioning well theres no clarity on just how much additional daughter is being collected and how thats being used a lot of these companies arent african theyre not even based in kenya in africa forget kenya long so what is a kenyan citizens of birth to do one American Company uses their data sell their data markets it you know as a product and without their consent without their ability to intervene to appeal to a court system thats kind of the gray area that were falling into the lot of these big you know that. Tech company. Facebook isnt the only Big Tech Company playing the connectivity card here in cannes last year alphabet the Parent Company whose most famous brand is google signed a deal with Telecom Kenya to quote connect the unconnected using billings. Billings loon is a pathbreaking project thats been 8 years in the making and the idea is deceptively simple use High Altitude balloons to provide Internet Connectivity in remote and hard to reach parts of the world kenya is where luna is making its commercial debut i spoke with Charles Merida he doesnt represent loon but its more well known Sister CompanyGoogle Googles mission from the get go was to really get a lot of the africans who are Offline Online and to make sure they get online in a more affordable and have better conduct content as well as relevance and the mission around noon is to ensure that were able to deliver connectivity to the most remote part of the continent and around the world so im proud to say that here in kenya is the 1st commercial agreement between noon our Sister Company and telco to kenya were amazed to be seen is what standards of. Accountability there will be will that mean that people are restricted to only using google esque sites for instance that remains to be question what data will become acted in the process of connecting people i put some of these questions to charles he made it clear he couldnt say much more about luke after all he doesnt work for that company he did tell me this though about googles approach to Data Collection. So what we do at google is we ensure that we have employed a user trust that is something thats really important and that users understand exactly what were doing with the data that we have on them we also ensure that theyre able to manage and control so transparency ability to. Manage and control the data that we have on our users is really critical and when its so transparent people get joy the magic of Google Charles uses a lot of positive p. R. Speak especially when it comes to discussing matters relating to data that doesnt come as a big surprise because data ownership access privacy is an incredibly sensitive legal and political issue across the World Governments and regulators have been looking at their data laws more and more seriously but perhaps the most widely publicized is the European Unions general Data Protection regulation otherwise known as g. D. P. Which set a Global Benchmark for strengthening individual rights of the personal data thats really the discrepancy that were seeing here is that western governments western societies have more space to keep these companies in check and to force them to abide by their local social standards and countries in other parts of the world and thats where the cornal is a label really starts to become evident there is not enough space for ordinary African Citizens to push their governments on these issues there is not enough space for us to actually demand a different standard of treatment in july has a point just take a look at the state of data regulation around the world and youll see how stock the imbalances according to a study by the law firm deal a piper north america or australia much of europe and china have what they would classify as heavy all robust regulation for many countries across africa regulation ranges from moderate to 0 the kenyan government says theyre working on it but the speed at which they are developing policies is being outstripped by the speed at which private players are revolutionizing telecoms and Internet Connectivity i dont th