From Privacy Crisis to Strong Growth Signal: Zktor Crosses Half a Million Users Across South Asia
Platform is gaining trust as concerns over AI dangers and Big Tech data misuse intensify. Beyond Surveillance Capitalism, A Policy-Literate View of Why ZKTOR’s Design Thesis Matters
At a moment when AI threats, corporate data misuse and the persistent neglect of user dignity are reshaping public attitudes toward digital platforms, Zktor is presenting itself as a timely alternative. Created by Finland-based privacy and AI expert Sunil Kumar Singh, the platform has been built around privacy and data safety by design, with a focus on restoring trust, safeguarding user interests and promoting digital dignity. During mass testing in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, Zktor crossed more than half a million users in two months, a milestone that not only reflects strong public confidence but also positions the platform as a potentially important future contender in the global privacy-tech landscape.
It has become commonplace to describe the contemporary internet as data-driven. The phrase is accurate, but insufficient. Data is not merely an input within the platform economy. It is the organising resource around which visibility, inference, monetisation and market power have been constructed. The success of dominant digital systems has depended not only on attracting users, but on rendering those users legible at scale. Their value has come from being able to see, sort, predict and influence behavior across enormous populations with increasing precision.
This model, often discussed under the rubric of surveillance capitalism, has produced services of extraordinary convenience. It has also normalised a structural imbalance. Users participate in digital systems as if they were spaces of communication, while those systems simultaneously process participation as raw material for behavioural insight. The result is not simply a privacy problem in the narrow sense. It is a political economy problem, because the architecture of extraction determines who sees, who decides and who benefits.
For a long time, criticism of this model came disproportionately from Europe: from regulators, civil society, legal scholars and parts of the press. Data protection, competition, platform accountability and user rights were treated as foundational policy questions rather than irritants to innovation. While enforcement remained imperfect, the intellectual framework mattered. Europe supplied an enduring alternative vocabulary for talking about digital systems one in which dignity, proportionality, consent and institutional responsibility remained central.
That vocabulary is now proving valuable well beyond Europe. In South Asia, the social web has grown at breathtaking speed, but many of its structural tensions are becoming harder to ignore. Digital participation is rising across populations that are linguistically diverse, socially heterogeneous and often operating under conditions of uneven connectivity and uneven protection. In such settings, the costs of overexposure are rarely distributed evenly. Women, younger users, regional creators and small businesses often bear disproportionate risk when the default architecture of a platform favours visibility over control.
The arrival of AI has sharpened the problem. Platforms built to extract behavioural value are now operating in an environment where synthetic media can be produced at scale and circulated with ease. The same systems that once justified themselves through personalisation and engagement are now being judged by whether they can preserve integrity under conditions of manipulated identity, blurred authenticity and accelerated content misuse. In practical terms, this means that platform governance can no longer be understood only as moderation policy. It must be understood as system design.
That is why architecture-first platforms merit closer scrutiny. Their significance lies not in whether they have already solved the internet’s contradictions, but in whether they are attempting to reconfigure some of its incentives. ZKTOR has emerged in public discussion as one such case. The platform is presented not only as an Indian social and chat service, but as a system organised around a privacy-conscious design thesis: reduced data visibility, more bounded handling of content, stronger emphasis on digital dignity and a stated effort to support social participation without reproducing the full surveillance logic of incumbent models.
From a policy-literate perspective, this is notable for at least three reasons. First, it suggests a move from compliance to configuration. In much of the platform economy, privacy arrives after the fact through policy documents, consent banners and settings menus. In architecture-led systems, the argument is more ambitious. Exposure should be limited by default, not merely negotiable by expert users. The burden of safety should not rest exclusively on the individual’s capacity to understand and manage the system.
Second, it indicates a shift from universal abstraction to contextual design. South Asia is not a frictionless market of homogeneous users. It is a region in which local languages, local economies and local social consequences shape digital life at close range. A platform that attempts to incorporate hyperlocal participation into its core design is therefore making a governance choice as much as a product one. ZKTOR’s ZHAN layer, which has been described as connecting creators, users and businesses within geographic contexts, implies that digital value should not be entirely detached from the communities in which participation originates.
Third, the thesis has implications for digital sovereignty. This term is often used loosely, but at its strongest it refers to a society’s capacity to influence the infrastructures that shape its public life. South Asia’s digital growth has been immense, yet the architectures through which value is captured and risks are distributed remain unevenly aligned with regional priorities. Platforms that foreground privacy, local fit and design autonomy are therefore entering a debate about governance in a deeper sense: who structures the digital conditions of participation, and for whose benefit?
Softa Technologies’ wider narrative reinforces this interpretation. The company has emphasised that it developed ZKTOR without early-stage venture capital or government grants, framing this as a form of design independence. Such independence does not guarantee public value, nor does it remove the need for scrutiny. Yet from a systems perspective it is significant because it suggests that the platform’s architectural choices were not immediately subordinated to external pressures for rapid monetisation or data-maximising scale.
The founder narrative adds an additional layer of policy interest. Public accounts that connect eastern Indian social realities with Finnish or Nordic privacy-aware design culture are best read not as personal mythology, but as an explanation of method. They point to a design philosophy situated between two traditions: one defined by rapid social digitisation under unequal conditions, and the other by rights-conscious scepticism toward unbounded data systems. If that synthesis is genuine, it could prove strategically important.
None of this should be overstated. Architecture-led claims must be tested, not merely repeated. A privacy-forward posture remains meaningful only if it survives scale, behavioural complexity and commercial pressure. Hyperlocal aspiration matters only if it produces usable systems rather than decorative rhetoric. And platform legitimacy depends not on intent alone, but on institutional reliability.
Even so, the policy relevance of the ZKTOR thesis is real. It reflects an emerging recognition that the next phase of digital markets may not be governed effectively by the same assumptions that produced the last one. If surveillance-heavy systems are increasingly distrusted, if AI has made authenticity more fragile, and if local participation is demanding stronger economic and cultural fit, then new forms of platform design are not peripheral experiments. They may be early responses to a broad structural correction.
Europe’s long argument with the platform economy has often been caricatured as resistance to innovation. A more accurate reading is that it was an early confrontation with the costs of treating users as endlessly legible assets. South Asia is now encountering those costs in its own way, under conditions of even greater scale and social complexity. Platforms like ZKTOR matter because they suggest that alternative digital arrangements are beginning to be imagined not only in policy papers, but in products.
The real question is not whether such products are flawless. It is whether they are pointing toward a post-surveillance grammar of social technology. If they are, then their significance will extend beyond market competition. They will be part of the wider effort to decide whether the next internet remains organised around extraction, or whether it can be rebuilt around limits, fit and public legitimacy.