By Molly Galvin
| Sept. 23, 2019
In just
a few years, digital technologies have allowed faster mobilization in response
to humanitarian crises, better documentation of war crimes in conflict zones
like Syria and Yemen, and more accessible platforms for organizing peaceful
demonstrations around the world.
However,
while social media and big data can be powerful tools for anticipating,
analyzing, and responding to human rights concerns, these technologies also
pose unprecedented challenges. Social media has been weaponized to spread disinformation,
interfere in elections, and promote and incite violence. And websites and apps
are continuously collecting broad swaths of data on their users — often without
them being aware of it, or of how or where their personal information is being
used or stored.
A
recent symposium at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and
Medicine, organized by the Academies’ Committee
on Human Rights, brought together leading experts on human rights
and technology for an-depth exploration of these issues.
“Human
rights — its vocabulary, its framework, its vision — provides a basis for
restraining the worst intrusions and violations of the digital world, and
promoting its best.” — David Kaye, UN Special Rapporteur and clinical professor
of law at the University of California, Irvine
“Human
rights — its vocabulary, its framework, its vision — provides a basis for
restraining the worst intrusions and violations of the digital world, and
promoting its best,” said keynote speaker David Kaye, United Nations Special
Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion
and expression and clinical professor of law at the University of California,
Irvine. “Not in some kind of vague … sense of what human rights might be,
but in the specifics of human rights law.”
Although
Americans tend to think of rights as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution,
international treaties bind countries around the world to uphold rights such as
privacy, freedom of opinion and expression, and nondiscrimination, said Kaye.
“How do we get from holding states accountable to holding [digital technology
companies] accountable? There is a huge amount of space to work with in this
foundation of human rights thinking to make it relevant to the companies, to
make it relevant to governments [who regulate companies].”
Digital
Power for Good
Throughout
the symposium’s panel discussions, researchers and practitioners shared many
positive examples of the power of digital technologies to advance humanitarian
goals. For instance, after the horrific 2012 gang rape and fatal assault
of a young woman in Delhi, India, panelist ElsaMarie D’Silva left a 20-year
career in the Indian aviation industry to create Safecity, an online platform
that relies on anonymous crowd sourcing to document sexual harassment and abuse
in public spaces. “It’s the stories that connect more of us and give us
courage to break the silence. When you can see a database — we find it’s
really powerful when you invite police and elected officials in the room and
demand accountability.”
The
proliferation of cell phones around the world has also empowered civil rights
advocates to record and report instances of abuse and advocate for
change. Tanya Karanasios, deputy program director at WITNESS, an
international nonprofit organization that trains and supports people using
video in their fight for human rights, described how Afro-Brazilians were able
to raise greater awareness of police abuse by recording incidents. This
brought attention from the international media and public defenders, who used
the evidence to pursue prosecutions of some of the officers.
However,
while data and images collected by citizens and civil organizations can shine a
spotlight on human rights abuses, it can be difficult to harness disparate data
to hold oppressors accountable. There are many challenges with
collecting, preserving, and analyzing images and data from many disparate
sources, said Keith Hiatt, who leads the information systems management section
at the United Nations International, Impartial, and Independent Mechanism for
Syria (IIIM), an entity created to collect, preserve, and analyze evidence of
the most serious violations — such as war crimes and crimes against humanity
—from many different sources. The IIIM prepares case files to help bridge
the gap between data collection and accountability.
‘Example
After Example of Real Harms’
Despite
the good that digital technologies can bring to humanitarian and human rights
work, they can be applied to interfere with this work as well. “The fact of the
matter is that a lot of the activism, organization, and civil society movements
we all care about…take place on platforms that were not designed for security,”
said Ron Deibert, who directs the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Meanwhile,
he noted, governments and private surveillance companies hired by adversaries
are employing digital tools and data collection to thwart human rights
activists.
And
although big data and AI are sometimes heralded as fixes to societal issues
such as inequality and bias, data collection and algorithm design can
unintentionally perpetuate these problems. “We are seeing example after example
of real harms due to AI…, automated technologies, and other forms of
algorithm-driven technologies,” said Mark Latonero, research lead for data and
human rights at the nonprofit research institute Data & Society. For
instance, research has shown that facial recognition technologies are
demonstrably biased against minorities, which has led the city of San Francisco
to ban their use.
“One of
the inherent problems is the societal presumption that that data is objective —
that it doesn’t have history, it doesn’t have politics, and it reflects reality
properly,” said Rashida Richardson, director of policy research at New York
University’s AI Now Institute. “None of those things are true, based on
current data collection and use practices.”
‘Hard
Work Ahead’
Much
work needs to be done to capitalize on the benefits of digital technologies to
advance human rights — while ensuring that these same technologies do not
infringe on them. “We as a country need to be re-engaging in human rights
mechanisms,” said keynote speaker Kaye. “The further we get from those basic
mechanisms of human rights and how they’re working in practice, the harder it is
for us to influence them and to educate ourselves about what is happening
around the world. It’s education. It’s engagement. It’s law.”
Technology
companies have become governors of online space, and in turn, are shaping
freedom of expression around the world. For instance, approximately 85
percent of Facebook’s 2.5 billion active users are outside of the U.S., with
many in countries where access to information is much more limited. Kaye
referenced a recent announcement by Facebook that it would use international
human rights standards to make judgments about expression on the
platform.
“In an
ironic way, the companies might be — if we push them — a leader in thinking
about the way that human rights can have an impact on our lives, and the way we
think about privacy and expression and other rights.”
“Everybody
knows we are in the midst of a global battle for dominance in AI technology,
but we are also in the midst of a geopolitical battle with respect to the norms
and values that will guide regulation of AI,” noted Eileen Donahue, executive
director of the Global Digital Policy Incubator at Stanford University’s Center
for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. “What I worry about most is
that we could be having a global, unconscious drift toward digital
authoritarianism."
Although
the human rights framework isn’t perfect, it is a good model to build upon in
order for governments, industry, and civil society to protect rights while
reaping the benefits of digital technologies, said Donahue “We have a lot
of hard work ahead to articulate in a compelling way how [digital governance] applies
with respect to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, right to privacy,
equal protection, and non-discrimination. It’s going to be a
cross-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder process.”
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