Everything is Data. Yes, Even Development.
This essay first appeared in the Internet Monitor project’s second annual report, Internet Monitor 2014: Reflections on the Digital World. The report, published by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, is a collection of roughly three dozen short contributions that highlight and discuss some of the most compelling events and trends in the digitally networked environment over the past year.
Recent revelations about pervasive data collection and processing have revealed a discomfiting nexus between the government and corporations. Consequently, the push for surveillance reform has largely been directed at the state, on one hand, and at large Internet and telecommunications companies, on the other. There are, however, serious threats to privacy and other civil liberties from another seemingly benign source: the matrix of organizations enacting and implementing development and welfare the world over.
Several factors are at play here. The desire to transform governance and civic participation can galvanize Internet penetration, the digitization of bureaucratic processes, and the roll-out of electronic voting schemes. Policy goals of financial inclusion and poverty alleviation often legitimize national identity projects and credit rating systems (especially when framed as essential architecture for fraud-resistant commerce). The frustration with endemic corruption and crony capitalism drives movements towards transparency and open government. Advances in technology trigger innovations in crisis mapping, healthcare, public transport, energy, water management, and agriculture.
Despite the worthiness of these schemes and the grave societal concerns that they seek to address, a common yet critical flaw may compromise or subvert them. By design or incidentally, they deal in massive quantities of personal data, yet — because they do not see themselves as data gathering projects necessarily — many of them have poor privacy and security practices. This is not surprising: they are largely designed and implemented by development specialists, not technologists and lawyers. Larger NGOs or global organizations may approach data privacy and operational security with caution and rigor; smaller, less sophisticated agencies and their floating pools of researchers and volunteers may not.
Extremely sensitive data may be gathered in contexts that are problematic, calling into question the role of power imbalances, the lack of agency, the inability to provide genuine informed consent, and the desperate circumstances that render the so-called “privacy bargain” meaningless. Even where these ethical considerations are mapped out and addressed, the data may be stored, disseminated, combined with other data, or used in ways that are privacy-invasive or just plain insecure. Commitments to open up data, whether mandated by funders, governments, academic institutions, or organizational values, can result in the publishing of identifying information rather than aggregated, anonymized data. Resource constraints may force the use of insecure platforms and services for communications and storage. Above all, the lack of awareness makes all of these possibilities real and widespread.
It used to be that the ‘privacy paranoiacs’ and the ‘open evangelists’ rarely interacted. In a post-Snowden universe, they have begun to engage in a critical conversation about positive-sum games and middle grounds, mapping ways to minimize the discriminatory effects of algorithmic bias, social sorting, and disparate impact. Equally importantly, the need for a cross-disciplinary approach to responsible data ethics has gained traction, pulling together security experts, civil society actors, data scientists, healthcare professionals, and other subject matter experts. This may not halt the emergence of a “welfare-industrial complex” of policymakers, technology vendors, welfare agencies, and law enforcement that takes surveillance into the development arena. It may, however, stem the disconnect between data and people, between statistics and lived experiences. Zygmunt Bauman talks of one person’s civilizing process being another person’s forceful incapacitation. By having a more nuanced conversation about the surveillance potential of the (often paternalistic) development sector, we may yet move beyond the chilling “If you’re not counted, you don’t count” rhetoric that underpins so many development efforts today.
