Digital Health Data Regulation in a Neoliberal Era: Lessons from the Global South

Abstract

Data-driven health technologies hold the potential to improve healthcare delivery. Yet they also facilitate the large-scale extraction and commodification of sensitive health data through a phenomenon often described as ‘digital health surveillance capitalism.’ This model has largely gone unchecked, as prevailing regulatory approaches prioritise privacy and security while neglecting broader societal harms arising from datafication. These societal harms of commodification are exacerbated by neoliberalism, which has led to the growing influence of technology corporations in healthcare and in shaping regulatory responses. The entanglement of data-driven commodification and neoliberalism has deepened inequalities between countries and regions, particularly in times of crisis. This has renewed calls for a decolonial turn in public health and a more deliberate focus on the Global South. Critical analyses of the intersections between regulation, health and surveillance capitalism, particularly in Global South contexts, are therefore of urgent scholarly importance. Drawing on interdisciplinary socio-legal analysis, this symposium collection focuses on case studies from Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Community of Portuguese-speaking Countries and Asia, to examine how neoliberal pro-innovation agendas have reinforced asymmetrical power relations and regulatory failures, enabling extractive data practices that undermine health equity. The collection’s focus on the Global South as a site of decolonial possibilities enables us to critically examine how alternative regulatory governance models could be operationalised to advance equitable health outcomes.