Data Privacy and Cybersecurity in Digital Agriculture: Protecting Farmers, Platforms and Advisory Systems

The expansion of digital agriculture has created new possibilities for precision farming, digital extension, farmer databases, smart sensing, online market linkage and AI-supported advisory. These developments are often presented as unqualified progress. However, digitalisation also raises serious concerns about data privacy, cybersecurity, ownership, consent, accountability, and system resilience. Agricultural platforms increasingly collect farm- and farmer-level information, such as land records, geolocation, cropping details, input use, advisory histories, and behavioural traces from app usage. Such data can improve service design and targeting, but they can also be misused, exposed or manipulated if governance and security are weak. This chapter examines data privacy and cybersecurity in digital agriculture from an agricultural extension perspective. It argues that digital transformation in agriculture will remain legitimate only if farmers are treated as rights-bearing participants rather than passive data sources. Drawing on recent literature on smart farming security, farm data ownership, food and agriculture cyber incidents, and governance of agricultural data, the chapter explains major threats, institutional gaps and practical safeguards. The analysis shows that privacy and cybersecurity should be embedded into digital agricultural design from the beginning, not added later as technical corrections.