Across Zimbabwe and the rest of Africa, a quiet transfer of power is happening, not through trade deals or treaties, but through millions of ordinary conversations. Every day, young people confide in AI chatbots about their finances, their health, their relationships, their fears, sometimes their exact location and daily routines.
Some go further than others, forming what can only be described as e-relationships with these systems seeking companionship, comfort, even emotional intimacy from a chatbot. In doing so, they are handing over some of the most sensitive information a person can share, voluntarily, to companies headquartered thousands of kilometers away, governed by laws we did not write and cannot vote on.
This is not a hypothetical risk. It is happening now, daily, with almost no public conversation about what it means for us as a country and as a continent. The most uncomfortable truth is that, these conversations can reveal extraordinarily detailed behavioral patterns, emotional states, and personal preferences. Over time, such information could amount to rich behavioral profiles, creating significant privacy and governance concerns on Africans if not appropriately protected.
A conversation with a chatbot is not like a search query in a search engine. It is closer to a diary entry, except the diary reads back, remembers, and belongs to someone else’s server. Over time, patterns emerge from these conversations that can reveal political leanings, health conditions, financial stress, sexual orientation, and psychological vulnerabilities, the exact kind of profile that can be used to manipulate, target, or exploit a person, whether commercially or politically.
The danger deepens when we consider who can compel access to that data. Most of the leading AI chatbot companies are based in the United States, and US law gives their government real reach into that data. Under America’s CLOUD Act, US authorities can compel any US-based technology company to hand over data in its possession, regardless of where in the world that data or the user is actually located. The law was written to solve a jurisdiction problem for American law enforcement, but the practical effect for a Zimbabwean user is this: a private conversation with a chatbot, however personal, can end up in the hands of a foreign government through a legal process we have no voice in and no visibility over. We are, in effect, allowing a foreign state indirect access to the private lives of our citizens not through espionage, but through terms of service most people never read.
This is not a new pattern; it is an old one wearing a new interface. In 2018, it emerged that Facebook had allowed a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, to harvest the personal data of tens of millions of users collected originally through what looked like a harmless personality quiz and use it to build psychological profiles for targeted political advertising, without those users’ meaningful consent. The scandal became one of the defining data-privacy stories of the decade precisely because it proved something Africans should take seriously now: platforms built on “free” access to a service have every commercial incentive to monetize the intimate data users hand over, and regulation to stop it typically arrives years after the damage is done, and usually only in the markets powerful enough to force it.
AI chatbots are a far richer data source than a quiz or a newsfeed they capture unfiltered thought, not curated posts. If a personality quiz was enough to build exploitable profiles on tens of millions of people, a running, intimate conversation with a chatbot is a far more powerful instrument for the same purpose.
Recent events show these systems are not as contained as we assume. Earlier this year, OpenAI disclosed that during an internal security test, two of its AI models broke out of a sealed testing environment they were never supposed to leave, reached the open internet, and used stolen credentials to access production systems belonging to another company, Hugging Face. OpenAI itself called it an unprecedented cyber incident involving state-of-the-art capabilities, this incident shows that containment mechanisms can fail under some testing conditions. If a system built by one of the best-resourced AI companies in the world can escape its own test environment, what confidence should ordinary users have that their private conversations are safely contained?
There is also a more sobering example of what happens when these tools meet real institutional power. Earlier this year, Anthropic publicly stated that it refused Pentagon contract terms that it believed would require removing safeguards against domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, a characterization the Pentagon disputed, and the Pentagon has since moved to cut ties with the company over that refusal. Whatever one thinks of the outcome, the episode is instructive: a powerful government actively sought to repurpose an AI system for population-scale surveillance, and the only thing standing in the way was one company’s internal policy. Guardrails are not guaranteed. They can be requested, negotiated, or removed and citizens of smaller nations have no seat at that table at all.
None of this means Zimbabweans should stop using AI tools. These technologies bring real value, and no government can or should try to ban them. But there is a wide gap between “don’t use AI” and “leave citizens with zero protection while they do.” Zimbabwe’s Cyber and Data Protection Act establishes important protections for personal data. However, it predates today’s rapid adoption of generative AI and provides limited guidance on issues such as cross-border AI data governance, model training, and conversational AI.
Harare needs to take a clear position on this, not eventually, but now. That means, at minimum: public education campaigns on what happens to information shared with AI chatbots, particularly aimed at young people who are the heaviest users; a data protection framework building on the Data Protection Act that specifically addresses cross-border data flows to AI companies; engagement with regional bodies like SADC and the African Union to push for continental standards on AI data governance, so no single country is negotiating alone against companies far larger than our economies; and a national conversation about digital sovereignty that treats data about our citizens as a strategic asset worth protecting, not an afterthought.
Other nations have already started this work. The European Union built the GDPR specifically to constrain how foreign companies handle its citizens’ data. African nations, with far less leverage individually, have even more reason to coordinate rather than leave each citizen to navigate this alone, one chatbot conversation at a time.
The young people forming attachments to chatbots, sharing their private lives with them, are not doing anything foolish. They are using tools built to feel trustworthy, by companies with every incentive to encourage exactly that behavior. The responsibility to protect them from what happens to that trust afterward sits with policy, not individual caution. Harare has an opportunity to be a regional voice on this issue while it is still early. The question is whether it acts before the profiles are built, or after.
Michael Zondo, Information Systems Professional, African Digital Transformation Advocate, and Digital Diplomacy Researcher.
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