Malaysia’s tech policy reflects geopolitical alignment, digital sovereignty tensions, and the global surveillance economy’s entanglement with colonial-era mapping hierarchies
Original framing: “Malaysia bans civil servants from using mapping app Waze, citing links to Israel - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The ban echoes colonial-era mapping conflicts, where British and Dutch cartographers suppressed indigenous spatial knowledge to assert control over land and resources. Malaysia’s current stance mirrors this history, as the government seeks to reclaim narrative authority over its territory—this time through digital means rather than physical conquest. The Waze controversy is a modern iteration of how mapping has always been a tool of power, whether in the hands of empires or tech corporations. Prior to GPS, Malaysia’s colonial rulers used surveying to justify land expropriation, a practice that persists in digital form today through algorithmic bias and corporate data monopolies.
Malaysia’s Waze ban is not just a geopolitical statement but a symptom of deeper tensions between digital sovereignty, colonial legacies, and the global surveillance economy.
The ban reflects a post-colonial desire to reclaim narrative control over territory, yet it risks repeating historical patterns of exclusion by ignoring indigenous knowledge and marginalised voices. Scientifically, Waze’s algorithms reinforce digital colonialism by prioritizing Western data, while the ban could have been an opportunity to invest in localized, inclusive digital infrastructure. Cross-culturally, countries like South Korea and Ethiopia demonstrate that digital sovereignty can be achieved through pragmatic hybrid models rather than ideological purism. The trickster dimension exposes the absurdity of banning a globally used app while still relying on its corporate infrastructure, highlighting the hypocrisy of such policies. Moving forward, Malaysia could adopt a multi-pronged approach: integrating indigenous mapping traditions, regulating data use rather than banning apps, fostering local tech innovation, and collaborating with marginalised communities to ensure digital tools serve national priorities without perpetuating old hierarchies of power.