FEB. 15, 2024 BY MICHAEL IGOE

A new report maps the landscape of humanitarian aid data — and finds reason to worry. Data protection, cybersecurity, and information for sale are just a handful of the reasons to ask if the aid sector is doing enough to protect information about the people it serves.

Also in today’s edition: A breakdown of aid donors’ sectoral spending, a look at the Munich Security Conference, and some thoughts on “epistemic humility” from billionaire and effective altruist Dustin Moskovitz.

Responsibility to protect

It’s Thursday, Feb. 15. Do you know where your data is?

Humanitarian aid groups collect a lot of data: biometrics, phone numbers, identification cards, ethnic and religious identity, financial information, geolocation, dietary habits, family size, history of gender-based violence, birth and death certificates, medical data.

Sometimes it’s even a condition for providing assistance, and in many cases the humanitarian sector says it is essential for getting the right support to the right people.

But as data collection has proliferated, so have questions about privacy, security, and proper use of people’s personal information, my colleague Sara Jerving reports.

Sara has the first look at a new report — released today — from Giulio Coppi at Access Now which maps the relationships between private technology companies and international humanitarian organizations. The map that Coppi has drawn is not a particularly comforting one.

He finds “an opaque world, increasingly consolidated in few hands, dealing in the data of the world’s most vulnerable and providing fertile ground to greedy data brokers and intermediaries.”

It’s a world that’s vulnerable to cyberattacks, exposed to a global economy in which the “rare datasets” gathered by aid groups can be valuable financial commodities, and populated by numerous players, each collecting different types of data through overlapping platforms under shifting rules and ethical norms.

“There cannot be meaningful consent when your life depends on giving away your data,” Coppi says.