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-
• Michael L. Best, Column Editor
How to set
boundaries
for powerful
international
actors is a question
yet to be solved
in any field.