Tech Tapestry Lab

Did you know that these new instruments are built on the principle that the same rights people have offline must be protected online? Moxii Africa’s work ensures that safeguards like appeal mechanisms and effective remedies for rights violations are now standard requirements for internet intermediaries.

PLEASE SIGN & SHARE PETITION: Scrap the Government’s Digital ID Project 👇 together.eaction.org.uk/scrap-digital-…

📢 Calling all journalists: if you want to learn how to identify and verify AI-generated content, @AFP has launched a new, open-access online course! It takes about an hour and includes plenty of case studies and exercises. Find it here: twp.ai/4iwNoa

How did a company from Shenzhen come to dominate Africa's cell phone industry? It accepts African markets as they are, not as it wishes they were. While some companies enter African markets with capital intensive Silicon Valley-style 'blitzscaling' approaches, China's Transsion entered the continent with a 'deep-plowing' strategy What's 'deep plowing'? An intensive, long-term approach of cultivating land to grow crops. For Transsion, 'deep plowing' means starting from the bottom up with the most underserved customers, building extensive distribution networks, localizing products significantly, and investing in consumer trust to cultivate long-term market dominance: • Customer 'deep plowing' — While competitors focused on premium urban consumers, Transsion targeted lower-income and underserved users, especially those in rural & peri-urban areas. • Distribution 'deep plowing' — Transsion embeds itself in the informal retail networks that dominate electronic sales on the continent, employing thousands of agents to reach places competitors don't and establishing physical retail depth from factory to final sale. • Product 'deep plowing' — Transsion went beyond superficial adaptation, spent years studying local needs & behaviors, and modified hardware and software accordingly, including pioneering multi-SIM phones in African markets. • Service 'deep plowing' — One of Transsion's deepest 'plows' is its investment in after-sales service. While many electronics have no official repair centers locally, Transsion established the Carlcare network, Africa's largest mobile after-sales service network. • Brand 'deep plowing' — Transsion created a brand ladder to cover the entire income spectrum: ultra-budget itel devices, performance-focused Infinixes, and aspirational Techno phones. This allows the company to capture customers as their incomes grow, instead of losing them to competitors. Transsion didn't win Africa's cell phone market by building for the Africa of tomorrow. They won by 'deep plowing' for the Africa that exists today. h/t @lumiao1026 whose research on Transsion informs this post — check out the links below 👇🏽

Everyone’s missing the real story here. Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses need human data annotators to train the AI. When you say “Hey Meta” and ask the glasses to analyze something, that video gets sent to Meta’s servers, then routed to Sama, a subcontractor in Nairobi, Kenya. Workers there manually label objects in your footage. They see everything you recorded, intentionally or not. 7 million pairs sold in 2025 alone. Every single pair generates training data that flows through human eyes in Kenya. Workers told Swedish journalists they see people undressing, using bathrooms, having sex, and accidentally filming bank card details. One worker said “we see everything, from living rooms to naked bodies.” Meta’s automatic face anonymization is supposed to protect people in the footage. Workers say it fails in certain lighting. Faces that should be blurred are sometimes fully visible. The person you recorded without knowing? A stranger in Nairobi can identify them. Buried in Meta’s terms of service is one sentence doing enormous legal work: the company reserves the right to conduct “manual (human) review” of your AI interactions. That’s the legal cover for routing intimate footage from Western homes to a $2/hour labor force operating under NDAs, office surveillance cameras, and a strict no-questions policy. Workers say if you raise concerns about what you’re seeing, you’re fired. This is the same company, Sama, that TIME exposed in 2023 for paying Kenyan workers $2/hour to label graphic content for OpenAI while being billed at $12.50/hour per worker. Workers described the experience as torture. Sama ended that contract, then pivoted to labeling Meta’s glasses footage. Same workforce. Same rates. Meta markets these glasses as “designed with your privacy in mind.” The privacy design is a tiny LED light on the frame that most people don’t notice. The data pipeline behind it routes your bedroom footage to a contractor with a documented history of worker exploitation, failed anonymization, and union-busting lawsuits. And the next generation of these glasses? Meta is planning to add facial recognition. The same system that can’t reliably blur faces in training data wants to start identifying them on purpose. The LED light on the frame is doing about as much for your privacy as the terms of service nobody reads.

We are at the #IndiaAISummit2026 where the vast ecosystem that makes up #ArtificialIntelligence is under debate and discussion. There is an underbelly in many discussions, and that is the human labour upon which AI is built. Unseen, unheard yet immensly valuable! #TechTapestry

Do you remember when you joined X? I do! #MyXAnniversary

Do you remember when you joined X? I do! #MyXAnniversary

Bypass this illegal order and access @Starlink internet direct on your cell 👇 starlink.com/business/direc… #UgandaDecides2026

We have come a long way!

#Tanzania appears to be taking an extreme stand on #informationcontrol. Death penalty for a dance? Is this a necessary and proportionate response to a #viraldance?

A U.S. court has ruled that training AI on over 7 million pirated books can be “#fairuse” if the output is “transformative.” Really!?! For African creators, this is a red flag — no consent, compensation, or recognition. 👉linkedin.com/pulse/what-bar… #IGF2025 #PlatformAccountability

🎯 #Surveillance -based marketing in Africa is rising—built upon a system that profiles, tracks, & targets users without consent. Opaque data practices + weak regulation = growing digital exploitation. 👉 linkedin.com/pulse/you-bein… #IGF2025 #DataPrivacy #SurveillanceTech

#G20SouthAfrica | What’s On at the G20? This week’s meetings. #ReKaofela #BetterAfricaBetterWorld

@MoWT_Uganda In the spirit of managing traffic, The Traffic Officers will allow Cars to cross over to Ntinda even when the lights are red to ease traffic.How will the automated system acknowledge the human intervention in thos case?

#Uganda has introduced a new electronic ticketing system which many deem poorly structured. There are also arguments that the #smartcity cameras have not been used effectively to address crime. Which should take precedent? Disyribution of fines or crime management? #EPSAutoUg