Are you HIV-positive? Gay? Frustrated with government assistance after a disaster? Aid workers are increasingly asking such questions of the people they help, hoping to better pinpoint their needs by gathering and analyzing data on them.
However, at a conference of development experts in New Orleans this week, some have questioned whether data collection in developing countries is being handled appropriately.
Ulrich Mans, cofounder of HumanityX, a Dutch group that helps aid agencies implement digital innovation, said that rapid growth in big data required aid agencies to become more “tech-savvy” and aware of the risks.
However, that change is happening only slowly, he said.
Some agencies are worried that their expanding stores of data might be vulnerable to online theft.
As a blueprint to avoid missteps, Mans pointed to a set of principles on privacy and data protection drafted by the UN Global Pulse, a data and development initiative.
In a report, it said that the amount of digital data available globally was projected to increase by a staggering 40 percent per year.
The concerns raised at the international conference on evaluating resilience reflect sector-wide introspection amid a surge in digital data influencing the delivery of aid.
One development worker who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak to the press said that data sets are being sent, unprotected, by e-mail “more often than you think.”
Some larger organizations are starting to bring in cybersecurity experts, but that has yet to trickle down to people collecting and sharing data on the ground, he added.
“I’m really hoping that we don’t have our Cambridge Analytica moment,” he said, referring to a scandal that erupted earlier this year over a British political consulting firm that used data obtained from Facebook accounts without permission.
A report last year by the International Data Responsibility Group said that, if leaked, data about persecuted groups “could be used to target these individuals.”
Data that could hint at one ethnic minority group resenting another — for instance, in Myanmar’s Rohingya crisis — could prove dangerous in the wrong hands, said Lindsey Jones, a researcher with the London-based Overseas Development Institute.
Xavier Vollenweider of the Flowminder Foundation, a Swedish non-profit that provides data to strengthen public health and development in poor countries, said his organization was well aware of the privacy risks.
He works on a pilot project in western Nepal that uses mobile phone records to help identify households facing hunger.
How often and where calls are made, as well as their length, are among signs that can detect when families are struggling financially, he said.
The information the group receives includes a caller’s location in relation to network towers.
“These are super-sensitive data,” Vollenweider said.
The pilot project’s 500 local participants have “trusted us” with it, he added.
For security, Flowminder anonymizes the data shared by the cellphone provider in real time, as agreed with the community.
It also encrypts and stores data on computers that never leave the company’s building, Vollenweider said.
“Ten years ago, you would have gone to a telecommunications firm with a big hard drive and you left [with it] the next day,” he said.
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