My name is James Oyange, though many of my comrades in the tech space know me as Mojez. For years, I’ve worked in the “invisible” levels of the online space as a TikTok content moderator and a data worker. My metamorphosis from worker to advocate began not in the classroom, but in my own living room, when I observed my college-aged cousin. I watched him make repeated faces to his webcam, smiling, then frowning, then tilting his head, sending biometric data to a shared drive for a small fee. This unsettling new normal of having personal attributes used for AI training made me wonder about the real cost of this labour and where the sensitive data we give over so readily ends up.
This made me want to try to track down my own digital footprint. I found that firms generally deny individual requests for data access unless there is legal pressure behind it. This realization led me to obtain my qualification as a GDPR Data Protection Officer (CDPO), which equipped me with the vocabulary to articulate the systemic violations I had witnessed: the abandonment of data minimisation and the absence of any actual informed consent. This inquiry is the result of that journey, combining my first-hand experience in the platform work trenches with professional skills to investigate how the „invisible workforce“ of AI in the Global South is being turned into a processed commodity.
Through interviews with nine comrades across Kenya, from the high-pressure environments of Nairobi to the informal settlements of Kibra and the quiet retreats of Machakos, I have documented a pattern where the human body is treated as raw material. Whether it is Joe being asked for photos of his feet, Jenny documenting her child’s sleep, or Stu selling his facial angles for cents, the boundary between labour and personal resource has disappeared. This work serves as the foundation for the Data Safety Alliance (DSA), an organization I founded to ensure that the workers powering the AI revolution are no longer invisible datasets, but informed advocates capable of defending their own dignity and privacy.