2026/07/28 by Rony Kurniawan Pratama, Muhamad Reznu Firsyawardana, Rino Andreas +2
Social Sciences · #Computational and Text Analysis Methods #Ethics and Social Impacts of AI #Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
paper · doi:10.1080/10646175.2026.2708040
openalex publication_date 2026/07/28 · openalex created_date 2026/07/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
This paper examines the politics of data privacy in Indonesia through a dialogue between data colonialism and postcolonial theory, arguing that contemporary data governance arrangements between Indonesia and the United States reproduce asymmetrical power relations continuous with, though not identical to, historical colonial extraction. Guided by three research questions concerning the textual, discursive, and sociocultural dimensions of Indonesian data governance, we apply Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis (CDA) to a multimodal corpus of 26 verified Indonesian news articles, the Personal Data Protection Law (UU PDP No. 27 of 2022), US trade policy texts, 47 coded Twitter/X posts and Kompasiana opinion pieces from the Bjorka data breach controversy (2022–2025), and ethnographic accounts from Indonesian data subjects. Findings reveal that Indonesian data governance discourse operates through three identifiable discursive strategies, normalization, fatalization, and selective sovereignty, alongside a counter-strategy we name subaltern sovereignty discourse. Drawing on Said, Spivak, and Bhabha alongside Couldry and Mejias, we argue that data colonialism in Indonesia is best understood as a postcolonial condition characterized by the persistence of extractive structures, the emergence of hybrid subjectivities, and the silencing of subaltern voices in formal governance discourse while those voices erupt with force in social media counterpublics. We conclude by calling for a decolonial reorientation of data governance premised on Indonesian informational sovereignty, while offering a sharp critique of the reactionary appropriation of anti-colonial language by Western political figures.