Fleeing war? Need shelter? Personal data first, please
More people have been displaced by violence and natural disasters over the past decade than ever before in human history, and the numbers — that already exceed 100 million — keep climbing. Between ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan’s mass expulsion of people of Afghan origin and Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, millions more people have been newly forced to leave their homes since October.
When people become displaced en masse, organizations like the U.N., with its World Food Program and refugee agency, will often step in to help. But today, sometimes before they distribute food or medicine, they typically collect refugees’ data. Fingerprinting, iris scans and even earlobe measurements are now a common requirement for anyone seeking to meet their basic needs.
This week I caught up with Zara Rahman, a tech and social justice researcher who studies the drive across international humanitarian and intergovernmental organizations like the U.N. and the World Bank to digitize our identities.
“Of course, U.N. agencies are trying to figure out how much food and what resources we need,” Rahman told me. But “the amount of information that is being demanded and collected from people in comparison to what is actually needed in order to provide resources is just wildly different.”