Vviewpoints

DOI: 10.1145/3325279

Global Computing
Global Data Justice

A new research challenge for computer science.

tion, and can help evaluate progress toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. If data technologies are used in a good cause, they confer unprecedented power to make the world a fairer place.

That ‘if’, though, deserves some attention. The new data sources’ value to the United Nations, to humanitarian actors, and to development and rights organizations are only matched by their market value. If it is possible to monitor who is poor and vulnerable, it is also possible to manipulate and sur-veil. Surveillance scholar David Lyon3 has said that all surveillance operates along a spectrum between care and control: a database like Aadhaar can be used to channel welfare to the needy, but it could also be used to target consumers for marketing, voters for political campaigns, transgender people or HIV sufferers for exclusion—the list is endless. The possibilities for monetizing the data of millions of poor and vulnerable people are endless, and may be irresistible if hard boundaries are not set. But how to set boundaries for powerful international actors is a question yet to be solved in any field.

Data technologies have very different effects in different social, eco-

WHEN THE WORLD’S larg- est biometric popula- tion database—India’s Aadhaar system—was challenged by activists the country’s supreme court issued a historic judgment. It is not acceptable, the court said, to allow commercial firms to request details from population records gathered by government from citizens for purposes of providing representation and care. The court’s logic was important because this database had, for a long time, been becoming a point of contact between firms that wanted to conduct ID and credit checks, and government records of who was poor, who was vulnerable, and who was on which type of welfare program. The court also, however, said that this problem of public-private function creep was not sufficiently bad to outweigh the potential good a national population database could do for the poor. Many people, they said, were being cheated out of welfare entitlements because they had no official registration, and this was more unfair than the monetization of their official records.

This judgment epitomizes the
problem of global data justice. The
databases and analytics that allow
previously invisible populations to
be seen and represented by authori-
ties, and which make poverty and
disadvantage harder to ignore, are a
powerful tool for the marginalized
and vulnerable to claim their rights
and entitlements, and to demand fair
representation. 2 This is the claim the
United Nations is making5 in rela-
tion to new sources of data such as
cellphone location records and social
media content: if the right authorities
can use them in the right way, they
can shine a light on need and depriva-