In today’s digital phenotyping economy, human life is increasingly turned into data as the Internet of Things (IoT) such as smartphones, wearable devices, smart rings, connected medical devices, smart home sensors/devices, platform/ride-hailing based apps, gig economy platforms, connected vehicles, environmental sensors, and other internet-connected technologies continuously collect behavioral, physical health, socioeconomic and environmental data for storage, analysis, and commodification of information. This extends beyond visible surveillance into everyday emotional and biological life, where objective health and psychological signals like mobility, sleep routines, social interactions, mental health risks, devices usage, even genetic information and bodily signals are translated into measurable data that is colonizing our lives [1]. The result is a system in which people are understood less as individuals and more as predictive data points used by institutions for markets, power, real time digital proxy for a person’s physical or mental well-being, and accumulation [2]. At the same time, advertising systems use behavioral prediction to shape attention and maximize engagement, turning everyday digital interaction into a monetized feedback loop.
This logic extends into biology through genomic commodification where consumer DNA testing and large biobanks transform genetic material into a resource for research and commercial use [3], raising questions about consent, ownership, and long-term control. Within surveillance capitalism, a small number of companies accumulate vast behavioral datasets, commercializing their analysis and concentrating power over information, markets, and even political discourse without meaningful individual control [4]. Overall, data capitalism treats human experience as an extractive resource composed of behavioral and biological traces.
In contexts such as Kenya, mobile money systems like M-Pesa illustrate this dynamic clearly. Digital payments generate continuous behavioral data that can be used for credit scoring and profiling, linking everyday financial activity to ongoing data production [5]. Kenya’s emerging data economy can therefore be understood as a frontier of digital capitalism in which daily life is increasingly converted into extractable and predictive information. This transformation is not merely technological but structural, reshaping economic value creation and how individuals are positioned within systems of finance, governance, and computation.
Mobile money platforms such as Safaricom’s M-Pesa have expanded financial inclusion at unprecedented scale by enabling digital transactions for populations previously excluded from formal banking systems[6]. However, the same infrastructure that enables access also produces continuous behavioral data, turning routine economic activity into granular datasets used for credit scoring, risk assessment, police surveillance, smart theft, and consumer profiling [7]. Financial inclusion and data extraction thus operate as interconnected dimensions of a single digital system.
This dynamic extends into platform ecosystems dominated by global gig technology companies where user engagement is continuously tracked, segmented, and monetized through advertising architectures dependent on behavioral prediction [8]. These systems do not merely observe behavior but actively shape it by optimizing attention flows to maximize profitability. As Shoshana Zuboff argues in her analysis of surveillance capitalism, behavioral surplus becomes the raw material for predictive products traded in behavioral futures markets [9]. In Kenya and other parts of the Global South, these infrastructures that include health records marketing to multinationals operate amid rapid digital adoption, and uneven regulatory capacity, deepening power struggle and inequalities between data subjects and data controllers.
The political implications of this asymmetry are evident in controversies such as Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in Kenya during the 2017 electoral cycle, where partisan profiling based on social media data was reportedly used in political messaging strategies [10]. Although the precise impact remains debated, the case illustrates how democratic processes can be influenced by transnational data infrastructures operating beyond effective national oversight. Political agency becomes entangled with exclusionary systems that translate behavioral traces into targeted persuasion, raising concerns about rights to free will, manipulation and informational inequality.
At the institutional level, Kenya has responded through legal frameworks such as the Data Protection Act of 2019, which established the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ODPC) to oversee compliance and protect personal data [11]. While this represents progress in recognizing data risks, regulatory systems often struggle to keep pace with rapidly evolving Internet of Things found inside homes, worn on bodies, and transnational digital infrastructures embedded in global cloud systems. As a result, governance gaps persist between legal frameworks to protect human dignity, consent giving, and operational technological realities by Big Tech.
The expansion of biometric and identity systems further complicates this landscape. Kenya’s Huduma Namba initiative, designed to centralize biometric and demographic data for public service delivery, reflects both the promise and risk of large-scale data consolidation. Such systems may improve efficiency and reduce fraud, but they also concentrate sensitive personal information, raising concerns about continuous surveillance, and data security [12]. Similar concerns emerged with the multinational Worldcoin’s iris-scanning project, which offered financial incentives to Kenyan participants in exchange for scanning their eye irises to create a unique eye biometric data, verifiable digital global ID to be used in global identity systems. This is a shift that extends into emerging domains such as genomic commodification. Genomic commodification transforms genetic material into tradable datasets through platforms such as 23andMe and large repositories like Biobanks [13]. These systems advance biomedical innovation but raise concerns about consent, data permanence, and asymmetries between contributors and commodifiers of genomic resources who express results in monetary worth instead of intrinsic/inherent human value [14]. The Worldcoin project prompted regulatory scrutiny in Kenya, highlighting body parts ethical issues around bodily data extraction, consent, and the permanence of biometric identifiers [15].
These developments signal a broader shift in the knowledge of personhood under data capitalism. Individuals are increasingly represented not as unified agents but as data derived from behavioral, financial, and biological information. Human beings are reconstructed as statistically legible entities whose future actions are inferred from past patterns. This transformation is not only descriptive but performative, as predictive systems shape real-world conditions of decision-making. Credit scoring affects access to finance and biometric systems determine authentication and inclusion. Prediction thus becomes a mode of governance rather than a neutral analytic tool.
Kenya occupies a significant position within this global configuration because its digital infrastructures combine rapid technological adoption with evolving institutional capacity. Mobile money systems, biometric identity platforms, and digital communication networks generate dense environments of data production. Participation in everyday economic and social life often requires engagement with these systems, meaning data extraction becomes a condition of inclusion rather than a voluntary exchange. This complicates conventional notions of exploitation, moral responsibility, the common good, human agency and personal privacy by assuming equal informational and structural conditions between individuals and institutions thus limiting power balance. It complicates where the burden of moral responsibility and accountability for actions lies. Is it with the developer of IoT, the user, the government or the affected individuals? It also prompts debate over whether IoT serves the common good and how human agency is exercised within these systems, particularly regarding the extent of individual control over decisions and the protection of personal privacy.
The theological-ethical framework of Magnifica Humanitas offers a counterpoint, emphasizing the irreducible dignity of the human person as a moral reality that cannot be reduced to power dynamics, productivity, utility, or informational traceability [16]. From this perspective, technological systems must be evaluated not only by efficiency or innovation but by whether they preserve or undermine human integrity. This introduces limits to commodification, suggesting that certain aspects of human life cannot be ethically reduced to data without distortion. From this standpoint, consent alone is insufficient justification for extensive data extraction, particularly where participation in digital systems does not give adequate information of the end product of the data. When access to employment, healthcare, communication, and financial services depends on data-driven platforms, voluntariness becomes constrained. Ethical evaluation must therefore extend beyond procedural consent toward broader questions of justice, awareness creation and structural equality.
The Kenyan experience illustrates this tension between inclusion and extraction. While systems like M-Pesa expand financial access, they also embed users within predictive financial infrastructures that continuously classify and evaluate behavior. Similarly, state and corporate biometric systems promise efficiency and security while concentrating sensitive data in ways that increase vulnerability to misuse or exclusion. Digital participation thus becomes inseparable from continuous data production. Addressing these challenges requires reorienting data governance toward limitation, accountability, and human-centered design. Data collection should be purpose-specific to prevent uncontrolled reuse across commercial, political, or institutional domains. Biometric and genomic data require heightened safeguards by policies, norms and code of conduct to hold dishonesty and data lust responsible due to their permanence, since breaches cannot be remedied through simple deletion or correction. Transparency must also be built into system architecture so that data flows and decision-making processes are publicly intelligible. Ultimately, the central ethical question raised by Kenya’s data economy is not only how data should be regulated but what kind of human future is being constructed. The expansion of data capitalism through IoT, digital phenotyping, and genomic commodification signals a significant reorganization of how human life is perceived and governed. Yet this trajectory is not deterministic; it is shaped by institutional design, legal frameworks, and ethical commitments.
Magnifica Humanitas articulates a vision in which technological development serves the flourishing of human beings as irreducible moral agents rather than reducible informational objects [17]. The challenge is to build systems of digital governance that recognize both the value and limits of data. Kenya’s digital transformation therefore stands at a critical juncture: it may deepen regimes of extraction or contribute to alternative models grounded in dignity, justice, and the recognition that human life cannot be fully translated into computation.
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[1] Couldry, Nick, and Ulises A. Mejias. The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019.
[2]Mejias, Ulises A., and Nick Couldry. “Datafication.” Internet Policy Review 8, no. 4 (2019).
[3] Jenny Reardon, The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge after the Genome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
[4] Jenny Reardon, The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge after the Genome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
[5] William Jack and Tavneet Suri, “Risk Sharing and Transactions Costs: Evidence from Kenya’s Mobile Money Revolution,” Science 347, no. 6229 (2015): 963–967.
[6] William Jack and Tavneet Suri, “Risk Sharing and Transactions Costs: Evidence from Kenya’s Mobile Money Revolution,” Science 347, no. 6229 (2015): 963–967.
[7] Safaricom PLC, Annual Reports and M-Pesa Service Reports (various years); World Bank, Global Findex Database: Financial Inclusion Data (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025).
[8] Meta Platforms, Inc., Business Model Documentation and Advertising System Overview (Menlo Park, CA: Meta Platforms, corporate disclosures and technical documentation, 2023).
[9] Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power(New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).
[10] Abdi Latif Dahir. “We’d Stage the Whole Thing: Cambridge Analytica Uncovered.” BBC News, March 20, 2018. Accessed June 20, 2026.
[11] Republic of Kenya, Data Protection Act (Nairobi: Government Printer, 2019); Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (Kenya), Annual Reports and Enforcement Notices (various years).
[12] Government of Kenya, National Integrated Identity Management System (Huduma Namba) Documentation (Nairobi: Ministry of Interior, various publications); supplemented by civil society and policy analyses on implementation and governance.
[13] Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). Barbara Prainsack and Alena Buyx, Solidarity in Biomedicine and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
[14] Worldcoin Foundation, Biometric Identity Program Reports (various publications, 2023–2024); Government of Kenya regulatory communications and suspension/oversight statements regarding Worldcoin operations.
[15] Jukka-Pekka Onnela and Scott L. Rauch, research on digital phenotyping and computational mental health, including peer-reviewed articles in biomedical and psychiatric informatics journals (various years).
[16] 23andMe, Research Partnership Publications and Reports (Mountain View, CA: 23andMe, various years); UK Biobank, Ethics, Governance, and Access Framework Documentation (Oxford, UK: UK Biobank, various publications).
[17] Vatican Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and Dicastery for Culture and Education. Reflections on Human Dignity and Technology in the Digital Age. Vatican City: Vatican City State, 2026.